[skat20phys]

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.

[holub008]

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...

[ghaff]

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).

[vitaflo]

If we work backwards the odd wording here is "driven back". It's possible they mean by boat, and the spot 10 miles from the lodge with a dock is Daisy Farm campsite. There's no ranger station but it is manned in-season, perhaps what they meant there.

But to hike 18 miles to Daisy Farm? Certainly they would have had to drop off the canoe. And "canoeing back from Ryan Island" to me says they did drop off the canoe. My guess is they dropped it off and tried to hike back to the lodge on foot (which would be a long hike) and got turned around.

The problem is the trail from Malone Bay goes the wrong way. It would be more likely for them to portage from Ryan Island to Chippewa Harbor or Lake Richie campground, drop off the canoe at that campground, and then attempt the hike back. The mileage from there is close.

Another reason why I think they ended up at Daisy Farm is that it says "their best shot was to find the coastline since following that was guaranteed". Following the the wild coast of Isle Royale in the dark is a suicide mission. However, the trail from Daisy Farm to Rock Harbor does follow the coast. In fact its one of the only trails on that side of the park that does.

My guess is they didn't get off the trail and into the wilderness at all, they just took a wrong turn onto a different trail and decided to take whatever trail they ended up on to Daisy Farm and then head to the Lodge. At which point they bugged the campsite director.

I also agree it's obvious they did not go onto Ryan Island. They even had GPS coordinates of where to go. No doubt they would have bushwhacked to take a picture if they did go. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe they not only didn't bushwhack then, they also didn't do it on their hike back in the middle of the night. IE, they stayed on marked trials the whole time.

Lots of strange embellishments in this story.

[rogerdickey]

We were definitely on Ryan Island :) It's very easy to get to. The trip from Ryan Island back to Rock Harbor is another story... Don't try to do that all in one day and half in the dark.

[holub008]

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...

[ghaff]

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]

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

(Or at least very poorly told and edited)

[ghaff]

It's possible someone got confused somewhere in the telling (e.g. they got lost on a hike unrelated to canoeing out to Ryan Island) but it doesn't really make sense as written.

[mark-r]

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

[ttul]

I added it to Google Maps anyway.

[Wistar]

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.

[zenexer]

Based on my attempts to add local businesses, I'd say it can take quite a while, and some additions seem to just get "lost". Check back in a month or two--and that's assuming the addition includes sufficient photographic evidence. That's easy enough for businesses, but I don't know how they handle geographic features. They might just reject it.

[ttul]

It’s under review. I have added stranger things and they got into Maps within a short while.

[Goronmon]

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.