A mother and son who unraveled a geographic hoax

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moose-boulder-debunked

362 103 6 years ago

cheschire• 6 years ago

When I talk with people who are not sure what the purpose of life is, I point to people like this guy as an example of what the purpose can be.

There's really no point in his travels other than personal satisfaction. That people can be motivated by things like this helps me to relax, and I hope more people learn to enjoy these simple things as well.

Swizec• 6 years ago

Viktor Frankl’s book really helped me here.

There is no purpose to life. But you need one to be happy/thrive/survive. So pick a purpose and go for it. Any purpose will do, just choose.

LandR• 6 years ago

The book is "Mans Search for Meaning", and I would also recommend it to anyone.

klenwell• 6 years ago

My favorite illustration of this principle. From an account of one of the first MMORPGs:

Under the resource system, players could gather raw materials, like ore, and make them into finished goods, like armor, which, once used, would begin to break down and reënter the pool as raw materials. Players, it turned out, liked to make things—they were turning out hundreds, and even thousands, of swords and shields and gauntlets—but instead of using them, or throwing them out, which would have had the same effect, they hoarded them. One player reportedly had a collection of ten thousand identical shirts.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/05/28/pimps-and-drag...

A collection of ten thousand identical shirts. Yet there are times in my life when I could have certainly appreciated the therapeutic benefit, if not higher purpose, in coming home from the office and spending all evening folding t-shirts in a virtual castle.

DoofusOfDeath• 6 years ago

There's really no point in his travels other than personal satisfaction.

IIUC, you're advocating hedonism as a sufficient purpose for some lives. I think for many people, the possibility of hedonism as the greatest possible good causes them existential dread.

Caveat: I've studied far less philosophy than I should have; I may be talking out my backside.

function_seven• 6 years ago

I'd wager that "personal satisfaction" is (or can be) something different than "pleasure".

To me--also with little philosophical study--"hedonism" refers to just pleasure. It's the sugar of life.

But I've gotten the greatest satisfaction in life from things other than sex/drugs/booze/games/etc. From creating new things, solving problems, and helping others. This is the protein of life.

philwelch• 6 years ago

Nah, that’s basically also what Kierkegaard said.

deanCommie• 6 years ago

Interestingly, I found hedonism as a SOLUTION for my existential dread. Of course I don't call it hedonism, but here is the path I followed. These are statements of fact to me, but of course they are highly debatable. Fork wherever your own experience does not match.

1) There is no God, as in a conscious being who created the universe for a purpose that is yet to be revealed to us

1B) The universe itself is uncaring, and it's current state is just the resolution of a very complex set of causes and effects. It's on a path, but there is no destination or goal.

2) There is no afterlife. Existence is consciousness, and when consciousness nds, there is nothing else.

3) Consciousness may or may not be special but it is irrelevant because we EXPERIENCE it as special.

4) Experiences and feelings are real, complex, evolving, and almost limitless in the range that you can experience over the course of a finite lifetime

5) Positive/unique experiences are inherently good to have. And good to provide to others.

6) Therefore, the only thing we can do is try to maximize the amount of positive feelings/experiences we each have, and maximize the amount we generate in others.

7) The exact balance between focusing on yourself vs generating in others, and the relative worth of being a force multiplier (e.g. sacrificing your own happiness for someone else, or multiple others), is an exercise left to the reader. So long as your actions contribute to a NET good for the world, it's probably okay.

8) What I don't like about the term hedonism is it makes it seem like I want to just sit around eating grapes and having sex. In a more macro sense, technology that helps humanity be more effective and have more leisure, a more egalitarian society, a multi-planetary civilization that is safe from extinction from a wild cosmic event are all things that I believe are of value to contribute to the overall increase of one's happiness/experiences, and to all of civilization. So my philosophy, whatever it is called, is completely compatible with humanity's progress

Causality1• 6 years ago

It seems like it wouldn't be terribly hard to check the existence of Moose Flats pond by pulling up the Google maps satellite view and then scrolling backward on the timeline. Even if it's a periodic feature it should show up in some of the pictures taken over time.

It's also a bit strange how they lost track of where they were in relation to the lodge. They didn't have phones with them? Even if you were foolish enough to go hiking without an offline mapping app you can still get from point A to point B.

arethuza2• 6 years ago

"They didn't have phones with them?"

I've had to give people paper copies of maps more than once when hiking because their batteries were flat on their phones.

NB I take a phone, an external battery pack and two copies of paper maps.

Edit: As an aside, I'm trying to reduce my reliance on digital maps and go back to using paper maps and compass more as I'm sure it reduces awareness of where you are (I've actually made more navigational mistakes using digital maps than when I mostly used paper maps).

flyinghamster• 6 years ago

A couple of other important advantages to paper maps: you can get a much better "big picture" view, as printed maps have a much higher resolution and can be printed as large as necessary. Zooming out on a digital map comes at the price of reduced detail. Also, if you drop a paper map onto a hard surface, it doesn't break - and even if damaged, a paper map can still be useful.

Ididntdothis• 6 years ago

The same is true when you navigate a city with a paper map. You really learn how everything fits together while with your cell phone you basically don’t learn the city.

DagAgren• 6 years ago

The further away from base stations you get, the more your phone will have to turn up its transmitting power, and the quicker the battery will drain. Going out into the wilderness will drain your battery quicker than expected.

bryanlarsen• 6 years ago

The island is heavily treed. If moose flats pond and boulder do exist, they're likely not visible from Google maps.

thechao• 6 years ago

I dunno... it doesn't look too heavily treed from Google maps. I'm thinking at best a puddle with a rock. Nothing approaching even a serious pond.

jboy55• 6 years ago

Bing is a bit more clear, https://www.bing.com/maps?q=ryan+island&form=QBLH&sp=-1&pq=r...

It might be possible that the 'n' shapped formation on the north east part of the island could flood enough in spring to form a short lived 'pond'.

mywacaday• 6 years ago

The article says the Island is barely a mile long but a quick measure on goggle maps at the coordinates give puts it at 720m long

willvarfar• 6 years ago

The article talks about a seasonal lake. Perhaps the size changes depending on time of year?

mark-r3• 6 years ago

The seasonal lake is the one on Ryan island. Siskiwit Lake is quite large and I'm sure it's not seasonal.

JdeBP• 6 years ago

Here's the edit that introduced this to Wikipedia:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/288109348

You can see how it was falsely sourced by adding it in front of the source that does indeed confirm (it being a re-hash of Shelton's earlier book The Life of Isle Royale, published in 1975) that Siskwit Lake is oligotrophic, but says nothing in support of the added material.

ahelwer• 6 years ago

I was going to speculate that the wikipedia user was inspired by xkcd's "citogenesis" comic [0] but that was published in 2011 [1] while the edit happened in 2009.

[0] https://xkcd.com/978/

[1] https://xkcd.com/978/info.0.json

Sniffnoy2• 6 years ago

XKCD did not at all invent the idea of putting false information on Wikipedia.

gabriel_shatana• 6 years ago

If the island has been mapped with lidar, it would be possible to find it in such way. Lidar can penetrate the trees and give you a surface model of what underneath.

CodiePetersen• 6 years ago

You should be careful with the "can penetrate the trees" statement for people who don't understand the technology. But you are correct. Like light, some of the lidar can make it to the ground and give us a partial map of the floor.

I'm sure more passes from different angles would get a better picture as well.

Semiapies• 6 years ago

I'm sure it's not the only completely fake thing in Atlas Obscura.

azernik• 6 years ago

Citogenesis in action!

skat20phys• 6 years ago

I've been there and have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, the boulder has always seemed fishy to me. It's a remote location and I doubt many people would track something that small, or care enough about it to know about the seasonal changes at that boulder. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me geologically, although it's possible. I also years ago remember people familiar with the site jokingly talking about how "if there were a boulder there..." which lent the whole thing a sense of fiction when I started reading about it. It was easy to see how a humorous fantasy could change into folk legend and then into documentation.

On the other hand, where are the photos? Where's the meticulous documentation? To trek all the way there to address this and then not take copious photos to share with the media?

They also got lost, which adds to my skepticism they even made it there, or were sure they did. Can you get lost there? I suppose -- there are a ton of islands and things there so I can see that -- but the area is blanketed with topo map coverage, and you've got GPS now. If someone were to get lost there, I'd question whether or not they even got to where they wanted to begin with. Siskiwit Lake is a fairly large feature on Isle Royale, and the nesting doll nature of the goal makes your target hard to miss.

In short, I wouldn't be surprised if the boulder isn't there (or isn't surrounded by water). However, I also wouldn't be surprised if this guy and his mother never actually went to where they claimed to go.

ttul2• 6 years ago

I added it to Google Maps anyway.

Wistar• 6 years ago

Do you know how long it takes to appear on the map? I used google maps as I was reading the story and didn't see anything on Ryan Island.

ghaff4• 6 years ago

Something about the sequence of events in the article is weird or I'm just missing something.

They got a water taxi to the bay on Isle Royale that was close to Siskiwit Lake and then portaged their canoe to the lake. (Which is indeed fairly close.)

Then:

After canoeing back from Ryan Island, mother and son got well and truly lost. At some point during their 18 miles of hiking, they lost the trail.

Where did the canoe go? Why wouldn't they have been being picked up and returned the same way they got there? There's lots of mention of GPS coordinates. Yet this story doesn't bother to mention that, I don't know, they got lost because both of their phones ran out of juice? (Because the story seems to take place well after the time when most people had smartphones and they were clearly using GPS in some form.)

vidanay• 6 years ago

The story is as fishy as the Northern Pike slime that is abundant around there.

(Or at least very poorly told and edited)

mark-r3• 6 years ago

I have a solar panel that can charge a phone. They're not hard to find.

holub0083• 6 years ago

Agreed on both of your conclusions. Looking at the island's topography [1], I'd be hard-pressed to believe there's a pond anywhere on that island, excepting maybe the northeast corner. But, their story doesn't add up. The timeline of the article states they paddled to Ryan Island and then it immediately jumps to them getting lost on the paddle back to camp. The whole story is about verifying the existence of this "island", so why is this crux of their journey not mentioned?!

I frequently canoe and camp around northern Minnesota and Lake Superior. I do not understand how they could have possibly traveled a total of 18 miles from Malone Bay to Ryan Island, as the article states. At most, it would be a 1 mile portage and a 5 mile paddle. Getting lost and adding 12 miles seems very unlikely, as you mention, due to all the navigable landmarks in Siskiwit Lake. And that's ignoring GPS.

My guess is that they are not strong paddlers and/or navigators, got to the island already tired, saw the amount of bushwacking that would be required to explore the island, and bailed.

For the record, I think this is really cool. Something about the story, as presented, doesn't sit right though.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/48.00956/-88.76993&lay...

ghaff4• 6 years ago

Nothing about this entire paragraph makes sense.

After canoeing back from Ryan Island, mother and son got well and truly lost. At some point during their 18 miles of hiking, they lost the trail. In their genuine terror—it was, by then, the middle of the night—they realized that their best shot was to find the coastline, since following that was guaranteed, eventually, to get them back to the lodge. Finally, they found the park ranger’s house, and had no choice but to knock on his door until he woke up. They didn’t know it, but they were still 10 miles from the lodge, and would have missed their flight off of the island had they not been driven back.

It looks like a 1/4 mile portage and maybe 1 1/2 mile paddle to Ryan Island from Malone Bay.

They were taken by a water taxi to Malone Bay. Why would they be walking back to the lodge without their canoe?

Assume that, for some reason, they were walking back and were going to come back for their canoe later. Seems an odd plan but let's go with it. Why would a park ranger have a house somewhere 10 miles away from the lodge (which puts it at pretty much the opposite end of the island).

holub0083• 6 years ago

Upon a little more research, in an NPR interview [1], Dickey does not claim to have exhaustively searched the island / proved non-existence:

DICKEY: We hiked in as far as we could to try to find the center of the island, was unable to find Moose Flats or Moose Boulder. Who knows; it could have been there, but highly unlikely.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815546895/the-lonely-non-isla...

Goronmon• 6 years ago

On the other hand, where are the photos? Where's the meticulous documentation? To trek all the way there to address this and then not take copious photos to share with the media?

The article reads like they didn't even look for the boulder itself. Just that they made a brief visit to the island before turning around.

The "proving it was a hoax" part seems entirely down to the lack of available evidence that could be found before the trip was undertaken. The trip itself seems separate from that.

mark-r3• 6 years ago

I hiked across Isle Royale back in 1976. I remember getting a kick from looking down at the largest island in the largest lake in the largest island in the largest lake in the world. I had no idea at the time that it actually had a name, it must not have been included in our maps. There was no hint of another pond in the middle of it.

anschwa• 6 years ago

Wow! Happy to have shared a similar experience on Isle Royal in the summer of 2010. One of the highlights of the trip for sure!

chrisshroba• 6 years ago

Fun fact: The son is Roger Dickey, the creator of Gigster [1].

[1] https://gigster.com/

fireattack• 6 years ago

This somehow makes me more suspicious about this story.

ilamont• 6 years ago

The identity of that first Wikipedia user to write about it—with those completely unrelated sources—remains a mystery, but all available evidence suggests that it was a person having a laugh, nothing more.

Wonder how many other Wikipedia entries have a similar provenance?

msla• 6 years ago

The question nobody wants to ask is, how many books are the same?

We know that maps deliberately contain copyright traps. Is this done with other reference material? How would we know?

DoreenMichele11• 6 years ago

It has crossed my mind that there's an awful lot of information available online and we often, as individuals, can't really know what's true and what's not. So we tend to rely to some degree on "consensus" -- on the idea that if "a billion people" say it's true, it must be true.

While not a completely useless metric, it's also not a completely reliable metric either.

With having this thought, I have doubled down on trying to stay out of things I'm not personally knowledgeable about. For me, this means trying even harder to stay out of most kinds of political discussions, which frequently boil down to gossip and name calling and deciding which "people" you want to be seen as and who you want to be for and who you want to be against.

Political discussion tends to not be about good policy and what kinds of policies we want to have and why. And I have concluded I honestly don't know enough in most cases to have any idea which candidate I should be talking trash about or whatever. And it all too often ends up a case of me parroting sentiments of acquaintances just to try to connect socially.

I wonder how much that's true for other people/"in general." And I wonder if we need to revisit how politics gets done and revise our de facto use of popularity contests now that you are so unlikely to meet people you are voting for or know someone who actually met them and we are reliant on Facebook and what not, which has proven to be very much game-able.

The degree to which modern politics so often looks to me like the plot from "Wag the dog" is pretty disturbing.

Which isn't actually intended to take this into the direction of politics. It's just to say that rubrics of social proof that were probably more reliable when the world was a smaller place have gone weird places in the internet age and we maybe need to think about that more than we do and try to find solutions.

mister_hn• 6 years ago

That's basically how medicine or AI works

DoreenMichele11• 6 years ago

To some degree, all sciences rely on the world respecting the views of "really smart people" who have PhDs or whatever. Most people aren't actually going to understand the science.

Medicine seems especially reliant on the social proof angle, but a lot of science is over the heads of a lot of readers and we basically latch onto experts we respect to help us decide which statements we don't understand but will essentially take on faith.

kortilla• 6 years ago

It’s a little different because those have negative feedback loops for punishing you for being wrong.

There is little punishment for being a steadfast communist/capitalist/whatever for your entire life.

tdons3• 6 years ago

if "a billion people" say it's true, it must be true.

Religion is a great example of this. I have yet to see proof of a god.

linuxftw• 6 years ago

What proof would you accept?

DoreenMichele11• 6 years ago

There are animals that navigate via sensing the geomagnetic field. Humans can't sense it (at least most can't, at least not reliably or strongly), but we have tools that sense it.

There are blind people. There are deaf people.

Failure by one person to sense a thing others sense isn't actually evidence it isn't real.

I long ago decided this is probably the best explanation for the divide between those who believe in some kind of God or spiritual force and those who think that's clearly Hokum.

Edited for typos, possibly due to autocorrect, aka autocorrupt, the bane of my online communication efforts.

GrantZvolsky2• 6 years ago

Proof of god? We can't even prove gravity, or for that matter anything else in the physical world.

rapind4• 6 years ago

Political actors have massive incentives to be dishonest and manipulate information to be favourable so it's a bit of an outlier... but it can also leak into a lot of other areas.

The average person is up against a well paid army of influencers (PR, marketing, advertising) who's tools of subversion are becoming exceedingly advanced and complex.

DoreenMichele11• 6 years ago

I think it's more complicated than that.

Studies I have seen and first-hand experience suggests that people in positions of power are typically fairly competent and got to where they are because of their competence, so they often genuinely feel that people disagreeing with their position are just stupid or simply don't understand the problem adequately. Their first-hand experience backs up this assumption in most cases and fosters habits that end up de facto being "asshole behavior" in many situations.

As they accrue power, they get surrounded by yes men who massage their ego, either to curry favor or out of genuine fear or because they are sincere fans who recognize their leader's competence and aren't competent enough themselves to poke holes in anything their leader says.

It's inherently hard to figure out how to avoid that outcome. Powerful people often keep long-standing associations with people who knew them back in the day because those people may be the only ones who have any hope of giving them pushback that is actually constructive and not politically motivated (in an "office politics" sense of the word).

The world hasn't solved this problem yet.

austincheney• 6 years ago

How does Lake Superior qualify for the title largest lake? Is it because it has the largest surface area of freshwater lakes? The Caspian Sea is technically a lake but is greater than 4.5x the surface area. Lake Baikal is the largest lake by volume, and is fresh water, having nearly double the water compared to Lake Superior.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_by_area

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_by_volume

kibwen2• 6 years ago

This is (understandably) misinterpreting the criteria for the title "the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world". First you would make a (rather small) list of all islands-in-lakes-in-islands-in-lakes-in-islands-in-lakes, then sort descending by largest innermost island and taking the first result. The only reason to actually care about the largeness of the other elements in the chain would be to break ties, which definitely won't be necessary. The fully elaborated form is still technically correct, but is mostly used for the amusement of its own absurdity.

billforsternz2• 6 years ago

I disagree, I think the consensus view is that the feature has to be in Lake Superior because that's the largest lake in the world.

ghaff4• 6 years ago

Is it because it has the largest surface area of freshwater lakes?

Yes. Per Wikipedia "The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of water, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea."

205guy• 6 years ago

More relevant from the wikipedia link: "Despite its name, it is often regarded as the world's largest lake, though it contains an oceanic basin (contiguous with the world ocean until 11 million years ago) rather than being entirely over continental crust."

Regardless, whether it's the largest or not isn't really the point, it's just that it sounds interesting. I believe Manitoulin island (which is a bigger island in a smaller lake) has a similar island-lake recursion pattern. If you start looking at islands (not necessarily the largest ones), there are also several lake-island recursions (Lake Taal on Luzon island being one). And then one could rank the size of the recursive islands (or lakes) at the various levels. It's a lot like trainspotting in the end.

evandev• 6 years ago

Apparently someone says it does exist and is going to prove it when the park opens again in mid-april[0].

TAUB: Since we have published the story, we've heard from a reader who claims that Moose Boulder does, in fact, exist and that when the park reopens this summer, they're going to go out there and take pictures and send it back to us to prove. And, you know, that would be awesome.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815546895/the-lonely-non-isla...

jogundas• 6 years ago

The article quotes him as saying "I did Google reverse image search for their profile photos". I am in Europe and Google reverse image search for faces of people certainly does not work. Is that a recent change? Is that local to Europe?

unreal372• 6 years ago

I've been doing that for years.

What do you mean "doesn't work"?

Example of how it works for me: https://share.getcloudapp.com/qGuob6D0

I picked a photo of a journalist at random. It identified her.

blackbrokkoli• 6 years ago

I don't think its analyzing the actual face. It probably only works when the literal same image (maybe cropped or with varying quality) is posted elsewhere, which probably not unlikely for forum profile pictures etc, or with journalists for that matter.

I might be mistaken though.

rogerdickey6• 6 years ago

"Son" here. AMA! Fun to see this on HN.

A few replies to some good questions:

1. Per @JdeBD, that was the Wikipedia edit that started everything. After 30+ hrs of online research, all roads lead back to this edit. I read 3 books on the island and found no mention of the boulder.

2. I took a bunch of photos that didn't make the article. Happy to share them offline with interested parties, but given that I could not find MB, they don't prove much.

3. The article does focus on us getting lost but that happened well after we left Ryan Island. This confused the NPR reporter too. Ryan Island is pretty easy to get to from Malone bay which is just a water taxi away from Rock Harbor. We had a working GPS with us the whole time which made certain legs of the trip a lot easier. How did we get lost with a GPS? The island is a mix of clearly marked dirt trails and large rock fields with no trail markings. You need to have a great sense of direction and some luck to pick up the trail again after traversing each rock field. We got lost after what must have been a quarter-mile rock field at 1am and the GPS didn't have the hiking trail marked in that area.

4. We made 2 landings at different points on Ryan Island, one southern and the other west / north-western. I did a lot of bushwacking from both points but there was no evidence of any water on the island or even mud where there could have been a "seasonal" pool. I was looking for a clearing or any kind of large flat-ish area but couldn't find anything like that larger than a few feet in diameter. The (small) island is extremely rocky and densely wooded.

5. Re the route, as many have noted it was very convoluted. We originally planned to go 18 miles in a day - the first half mostly paddles and portages, the second half is an 11-mile coastal trail back to Rock Harbor. The plan was to abandon the canoe at the halfway point and come back and get it via water taxi the next morning. After getting lost we gave up at the halfway point around 4am and camped for the night there.

codezero2• 6 years ago

I'm guessing bringing a drone to do a survey would ruin the fun of these excursions for you? :)

rogerdickey6• 6 years ago

Hah, good idea but IIRC drones are banned in the park.

holub0083• 6 years ago

Thanks for digging into this- what a cool adventure!

In your research, were you able to find GPS coordinates of the purported island? I'd be interested in taking a trip out to search myself, but doing a grid search of the whole island sounds challenging based on your report.

rogerdickey6• 6 years ago

No. That's when I started to get suspicious.

asynchronous13• 6 years ago

I couldn't help but wonder if Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was chosen intentionally as a fake source. WHOI can be pronounced "hooey", which is slang for a fake assertion.

OrangeMango• 6 years ago

Sure, and there can be a lot of confusion surrounding the name Woods Hole which makes it easier to hand wave questions away.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is an affiliate of MIT. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory is an affiliate of UChicago.

If someone says "that didn't happen there!" you can always say "oh sorry, I meant the other one"

rogerdickey6• 6 years ago

Funny idea but I don't think Atlas Obscura was in on it. Pretty sure they thought the boulder was real.

monort• 6 years ago

Have you checked this spot? It looks like an arroyo:

https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=dd84f18f-fcc7-41a3-89b2-f49db...

rogerdickey6• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if we were there but given the small scale of the island that looks to me like the border of a rock feature

A mother and son who unraveled a geographic hoax

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