A couple left Sacramento heading toward Ft Bragg, NC and ended up stuck in snow on a mountain road in the opposite direction. I don't know what they were up to but I sure don't think a faulty gps lead them that far off course. They needed to go east but instead went northwest. They're using it to cover up either something they don't want known or blatant stupidity.

California couple rescued after GPS leads them through snow-covered mountain road
The couple had no heat, water or food, authorities said
By Stephen Sorace | Fox News

Fox News Flash top headlines for January 26
A couple in California needed a helping hand after their GPS led them onto a snow-covered mountain road where they ended up stranded on Saturday, authorities said.

Oleg Donskov called 911 after he and his wife had already been stuck in the snow for several hours on Forest Highway 7 above Masterson’s Campground, Glenn County Search and Rescue said in a news release.

Donskov and his wife were traveling from Sacramento to Fort Bragg in their sedan and had no heat, food or water, according to the department.

Rescuers said a team reached the area on four-wheel-drive Jeeps and located the couple about 30 minutes past where the road ended on a non-maintained part of the highway that was covered in almost two feet of snow.


The couple’s GPS had directed them to take this route, which they called "unpassable" during rain and snowstorms, according to authorities.

"In the event GPS directs you to a non-maintained road, it is best to turn around and ask for directions or re-route to maintained roadways," the department said.

The couple was taken to safety and given alternate directions to Fort Bragg.

Bet somebody was trying to work up a lawsuit.

Husband was trying to off the wife and got "cold feet" at the last minute?

This happens more frequently than you might think. GPS is notoriously inaccurate in some mountain areas and in large uninhabited areas of the West. Just about every winter we lose some poor soul who followed his gps out into the wilds of Wyoming up a two-track and perishes after becoming stuck.
A friend come out from Kali a couple of years back to ride along on a pronghorn hunt in the Red Desert area of Wyoming. I knew exactly where I was going and we compared it to his gps, which was at one time over 30 miles off and would try to run us down through cutbank gullies or over steep enbankments. They may be just fine for down in the city somewhere but I would never completely trust one out in the puckerbrush.

Rocky, Fort Bragg Calif. not Carolina. It is a major Forest Service/County road...it crosses the Coast Range, it has been used forever to haul a bazillion loads of logs, but is only good for about 8 months of the year. It IS a gps mapping problem and a stupid problem...we can fix the gps map problem. It is the exact same thing that happened south of your place a few years back when that Canadian couple decided to take a shortcut through Jarbidge to get to Elko from Twin Falls, in the winter. That turned out badly. Same thing happened in southern Oregon a few years back when a family decided to follow the gps from Merlin to Gold Beach. Cheap gps units like those TomTom's will kill you...IF you are stupid enough to follow them.

Look at a map. They left Sacramento and should have been on I-80 eastbound. Instead, they went NW on a completely different road and in the wrong direction. This wasn't a case of the GPS not figuring out a dirt road in Puckerbrush USA.

ROCK CHUCK - " ... They're using it to cover up either something they don't want known or blatant stupidity. ..."

Don't ever discount a man's capacity for "blatant stupidity."

L.W.

There are 2 Fort Bragg's. One back east where they talk funny, and one on the west, west of Ukiah Ca. jfc.

In the 80's I had a boss who had a very, very, pretty and incredibly ditzy wife. They left Dallas for NW Colorado and about half an hour into it he pulled over to get some sleep so he could drive the lions share of the way telling her to just stay on this road. He woke up a few hours later and she was chipper as usual saying she was making good time. He asked where they were and she said' not sure'. He could not locate themselves on the map and saw a sign saying they were entering Tulsa.

My brother tells me his wife told him North.....is always where the radiator is pointed!!

RC, Fort Bragg , California is on the northern coast of the state and is nowhere near I-80. I-80 eastbound takes you to Reno.

those gps's take away peoples brain. my camp sits down at the end of a private, mile long, windy gravel road and the road ends at my place but another road ends about 50 yards away. there is a strip of private land that has a foot path connecting the two and also goes to a river. there is no way someone could mistake the path for a road. its all of 3 feet wide with rhododendron around it like the bat cave. but gps's show the 2 roads as connected. we also have several signs all along the road saying "dead end". we have had fedex drivers drive all the way to the river bank through brush and get buried to the axles. we had a friggen tractor trailer drive down and get hung up on one of the twisty bends and get that friggen thing buried bad for 2 days blocking the road. took two front end loaders to get it out and it tore the living schit out of the place. this is not to mention all the cars that drove right to the river bank before realizing it wasn't a road. i finally put a sign up that says "your gps is wrong". still get schitheads drive down, read the sign and start down the path before they realize the sign is right.

Geez. How can a GPS miss Hwy 20 to Fort Bragg? I've deer hunted that area the couple was found. I'm surprised they had cell service.

Ok, I wasn't aware that there are 2 Ft Braggs. I was thinking of the one in NC. Even so, I don't believe that a gps lead them up a forest service road. It would take them along state and US highways, the most commonly used routes. I've been driving by gps for years. What gets you in trouble is trying to take a series of short cuts, forcing the gps to recalculate time after time. Pretty soon it's looking for any road it can find. The blatant stupidity kicks in when you leave the pavement thinking you're on a US highway.

Fort Bragg and Durham, North Carolina by way of Sacramento, CA.

TFF!

I've been to both Fort Braggs. Prefer the one on the Pacific.

Didn't they decide Bragg was a conspiracy theory and re name it?

More than one place has a public road turned private (ranch) or seasonally maintained...
I have seen quite a few signs telling people that their GPS is wrong. It is that large an issue...
But being it was NC mountains... did it happen to be a dry county?

GPS? I'm doubting that. Probably Google Maps. They ain't the same thing.

How the hell sis they get to Forrest highway 7 from Sacramento? They would have had to drive north I5 to Willows and then gone west from there. Unreal stupidity.

Young man from Argentina came to Northern California to trim marijuana. He left State Route 299 on to forest service one to the town of Mad River.
This this young man followed his phone to a motorcycle Trail into pilot creek.
He showed up at my camp early the next morning. My three Healers had him for breakfast.
Well almost!
He had flown into so cal and bought a 500$ Plymouth Voyager.
Blew a tire on the way down( about a mile).
We're talking really really steep trail.
4 quads and a 4x4.
350 ft. Of 1/4 cable.we got him out.
Same year a forest service employee wanted to use the same trail in his 2 wheel drive. I think he had been smoking pot.
At least three more people do it wanted to do the same thing.
Not one of them had a map they relied on their cell phone and Google Maps

This year a young man from Texas took an F150 down the same Trail, two wheel drive.
I don't think that truck will ever see pavement again.
I'll go back up next spring and see if it's still there.

gps takes you all over the place...in northern arizona.

tour busses full of korean tourists stuck on ranch roads, mustang convertibles full of coeds running the back roads of Tusayan, semi truck full of lettuce bogged down and rotting off the 300 road on the Mogollon Rim.

real time info says highway so and so is closed, gps routes you to anything shown on its electronic map.......

You are probably right.
Google, tom-tom etc.(GPS navigation systems) shortened to GPS by the average Karen.
They often just digitize mapped roads in without confirmation of the rural ones.
I would bet that they lump gravel, seasonally maintained, class IV, V, VI, & VII into one category...

I have property on a island in the Straits of Mackinaw. Few years back a group came off the 10:00pm ferry and headed for the north shore to camp! The next day they walked back to get help as the the 4x4 4 door pickup and 28’ inclosed trailer where stuck? the trailer was so bent out of shape that you couldn’t get the back doors open to get the quads out! The local construction company used a 4 guys,dozer, and 3 chain saws and all day to get the rig out and turned around. The GPS had put them on a quad trail that I wouldn’t ride my quad on without a chain saw and others quads. The sad/funny thing the owner of the Construction company said that laying on the front seat was a map that showed the right way to the camp sites. The local Deputy expounded the truck and trailer till the tow bill was payed.

Trimmigrants are always getting lost in southern oregon and northern california. Had two walk into out fishing camp on the Rogue river, they had been lost for two days. 1/4 mile from a major road! Dumb and Dumber! The lost couple, probably ask the car for directions to Ft. Bragg N.C..

"It is the exact same thing that happened south of your place a few years back when that Canadian couple decided to take a shortcut through Jarbidge to get to Elko from Twin Falls, in the winter. That turned out badly. "

Lived near there at the time. Late winter with heavy snow in the mountains. Couple missed their US-95 road from Boise to Vegas and were headed east on I84. Realized mistake and asked GPS for shortest route to Vegas without specifying paved roads only. GPS sent them straight south across the Jarbidge mountains. They drove across the valley with their 2 wheel drive van and started up the mountains, encountered deep snow and slid off the unmaintained USFS road. Instead of walking back downhill, out of the snow, and toward the freeway, the husband took his trusty GPS, and started walking over the 9000' pass to a state highway shown 12 miles to the south. Hunters found his remains 18 months later. His wife was found alive at the van 42 days later. She survived on a bag of Jolly Rancher candy and melted snow water.

They are some better than they use to be, but the reason I'd never trust a Magellan over my Garmin. When they first came out, a buddy and I stashed a tree stand back in the woods and went to find it the next weekend with his newly acquired Magellan GPS. Engaging the brain told us that we were going 180 degrees in the wrong direction and found the thing after we turned around. Then just a couple years back down south we put in the way point to get back home and it wanted us to take a dirt road through an orange grove. Nope.

Have been using the system since it first became available for deploying/recovering instruments and studies of habit use. After the removal of selective availability, I find it accurate to within 2 or 3 yards and within a foot or so with differential correction. Absolute faith in the system, but have seen issues with maps and those that write the code for route selection.

Like said previously, there are roads in their data bases with historic paper based origins. They existed in the horse and buggy days, but are no longer maintained.

When the city folks have to start opening gates, it's time for them to turn around.

A lot of the old paper maps though depict wilderness trails etc that are no longer maintained and are not rendered on newer versions.

I like paper maps and I like satellite photos. I have a Magellan in the car and will use it in an unfamiliar city (most of them) but I don't really trust it for anything else. I'm not a hi- tech fan. GD

OnX shows a lot of desert roads near here that no longer exist. They're grown over with sagebrush which takes years to grow. I've tried to find some when 4 wheeling and failed. Onx will show that I'm on them but there's nothing there.

About 4 years ago, a friend and I traveled from Yuma up to Havasu City to tour the gunshops. We had the addresses for the shops and input them into his expensive new GPS unit his son had bought him. It worked just fine until we got to town and started searching for the gunshops. Dang thing lead us all over town, up alleys, down into cul-de-sacs and dead ends, we really got a tour of the town, never did get us to the shops . Stopped at book store and bought a street map, followed it to where we wanted to go with no problem whatsoever. Of course, we are both geezers that know how to read and follow a paper map.

Rockchuck:



Yes. I can find roads in our desert country on current aerial photos, digitize them for entry into a GPS unit, and from the ground one would swear there is no road. Mother Nature can erase evidence of our presence in short order. Even in the desert.

Have a good one,

You can't blame the gps for that. It did exactly what they asked and did it well. Too often a gps is blamed for user error. The biggest problem is that a user doesn't have the sense to turn around when the road is obviously deteriorating. There's also such a thing as zooming out with a gps and taking a look at the whole area, not just what's down the road in front of your nose. They would have easily seen Wells, NV, Hwy 93, and I-80.

Which gps you use makes a difference. We have a Toyota with a built in gps. It uses Toyota's own program. I find that the Garmin that I keep in my pickup to be more accurate. On our next trip, I'm going to run them side by side to see what all differences there are. The Toyota is a PIA to program. It tries to outguess what you're entering and sometimes I've had to rewrite an address in a different form or it can't take it.

Those Delorme map books they sell in bookstores have every goat path, dirt road, tractor path, and highway in them. Unfortunately, an awful lot of those goat paths and tractor tracks are no longer "available" or have washed out years ago. I can remember about 30 years ago, a couple of guys came down one of those washed-out roads that we "locals" had known was washed out for nearly 30 years prior to that. Dad and I were watching a field looking for deer, when they came along.

They said that Junior had told them the road was open, and they were "BY GOD gonna go down that road to get to XXXXX's place. I knew Junior, and knew he'd told them the right way, but they were hell-bent on heading down that road. The old creek had cut across that road about a quarter mile down the way, around a bend, and the bridge had been washed out when I was a kid. I told them to go for it, since they were hell-bent on doing it, but to get a really good run to jump that ditch..........................We were watching them as they turned around in another field. Dumbass drunks........................

Rock Chuck, my point exactly. Stupid people with no common sense are dangerous when they blindly believe their GPS.