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“I have no idea where people are going,” said Durphey, who lives in Hartland and has been spending his summers up in the woods of Bridgewater for 56 years. “I see a lot of them though.”
It’s not the kind of road you want to find yourself on during mud season, or really any time of year, if you don’t have all-wheel drive or the stomach for teeth-rattling bumps and inclines that pin you to the back of your seat. But the route, on which your GPS might shepherd you if you’re trying to get from Bridgewater Center to, say, Stockbridge, by way of Chateauguay Road (which becomes impassable halfway between towns), is not the worst trick technology can play on you around here.
Since personal Global Positioning System products hit the market in the early 2000s, the technology has advanced to the point that it seems almost magical, and many of us treat it as such. Most of the time, that’s fine. But on occasion, people relying on satellite navigation systems find themselves in predicaments. Last month, for example, dozens of motorists trying to get out of a traffic jam on the way to Denver International Airport followed a GPS detour and ended up stuck in the mud.
Such multi-car fiascos are rare, but in the rural towns that stretch across the Upper Valley, there are still plenty of places where an out-of-date route, an ill-conceived shortcut or human error coupled with technology can lead people astray. These slipups generally occur on roads that are not maintained by town highway departments — known as class 6 roads in New Hampshire and class 4 roads in Vermont.
“Pretty much every town in the Upper Valley is littered with class 6 roads,” said Plainfield Selectboard member Rob Taylor. “Some of the roads go from passable to impassable pretty quickly.”
One such problematic route runs from Interstate 89 to Meriden Village. While most GPS data providers direct drivers to take Methodist Hill Road from Exit 16, a few unlucky motorists have found themselves stranded after trying to follow a class 6 road from exit 13 or 14, Taylor said. “It tries to send you over Grantham Mountain,” he said. “It’s more of a Jeep trail. … If you’re driving a little single-family sedan, you’ll reach a point where you’ll realize, is this really the way I should be going?”
Often, that realization comes too late. Recently, a motorist trying to bring a friend to a doctor’s appointment got stranded on the road. Unable to get a cellphone signal, the man, who had a walking disability, had to trudge approximately two miles to the Meriden Deli to get help, according to Plainfield Police Chief Paul Roberts.
Another recent incident involved a driver service that was bringing a family visiting from China to Kimball Union Academy. Trying to get from a local hotel to the school, the driver got stranded on Black Hill Road.
“He actually drove out in the puckerbrush,” Roberts said. “We ended up taking them in a cruiser to KUA.”
Kyle Blakeman, who owns Blakeman’s Towing & Recovery in South Royalton, said there are also several problematic routes in Bethel, Randolph and Tunbridge that can trip people up.
“A lot of them are snowmobile trails in the winter and roads in the summertime,” said. “In the wintertime, they’re not passable.”
Rescuing motorists led astray by GPS technology has become a less lucrative proposition than in the past for Blakeman. “It used to happen all the time when GPSes were new,” said Blakeman, who started the towing business in 2008. “It doesn’t really happen as much anymore. They keep updating maps and everything’s getting better.”
Technology can still steer you wrong, though. While advances in GPS mapping have eliminated a lot of errors, these same advances have created a sense of security that sometimes overrides sound judgment.
Scott Reed, owner of Reed Truck Services in Claremont and Newport, has built a specialty around rescuing commercial vehicles that get stuck on impassable roads.
“People just get to a point where there’s no turning back,” said Reed, who has run the business for 26 years. “A lot of times it’s a really long drawn-out series of mistakes.”
One of Reed’s biggest jobs involved a truck full of high-end furniture on its way to a reality show. “Two guys from New Jersey ended up basically on this four-wheeler trail,” he said.
Another time, Reed was featured in Tow Times magazine after rescuing a trucker from a swamp somewhere in Acworth, N.H. “He couldn’t back up far enough to get out of all the bad turns he had made,” he said.
Sometimes, Reed leases equipment from local farmers to get people out of such predicaments. Like other towing companies around the country, he also custom built a piece of equipment designed to get into tight places and haul heavy vehicles out. In turn, he gets referrals from around the region for commercial vehicles gone woefully astray.
“That has become a fairly common thing,” Reed said. “People just didn’t do that before electronic devices that could give you navigation. … People just don’t use any common sense. They just blindly follow.”
Language barriers often contribute to the problem as well, Reed said. Many commercial truck drivers come here from Eastern European countries or drive down from French-speaking Canada.
It certainly doesn’t help that there are so many networks of narrow, twisting dirt roads around the region, either. “There’s definitely some pockets of road that are prone to it,” said Reed, who lives in Claremont on a road that turns to a class 6 road about a mile past his house. “I’ve literally seen tractor trailers turn around in my own driveway.”
On some roads where people routinely get lost or stuck, Reed has seen signs spring up advising people not to follow their GPS directions.
Slowly, such dead ends are being weeded out of GPS navigation systems. People who encounter bad routes can submit corrections to mapping companies, but the process takes time. The GPS.gov website offers the following 3-step procedure for reporting a mapping problem: “1. Submit a correction online (this section includes links to Google Maps, Waze, TomTom, Garmin and other GPS navigation systems). 2. Wait patiently 3. Understand.”
That third step makes sense, Taylor said. A lot of people don’t realize that GPS mapping requires human input. The satellites merely provide the signals around which the systems are constructed, he said. To fill in the data, companies use good old-fashioned maps.
“A lot of the GPS systems began with antique maps,” Taylor said. “It’s still sort of the legacy of these old maps. … There’s no sort of fact-checking being done.”
Over time, impassable or problematic routes are removed from the systems based on user-submitted corrections. The problem, Taylor said, is that not everyone who gets led astray takes the time to contact the company. “It requires the follow-up and motivation,” he said.
Taylor is working on submitting corrections for Plainfield roads that shouldn’t be in GPS routes, but he said tackling problems at the town level can be tricky because you don’t always know which provider made the mistake.
Even when all of the bugs are worked out of GPS systems, there will be ways they can let us down: dead cellphone batteries, lost signals, confusing information, etc.
It doesn’t hurt to preview directions ahead of time and carry a good map. On the map of Plainfield available at Town Hall, the class 6 roads are clearly marked. A motorist using the map as opposed to a misinformed GPS device would never end up stranded on Grantham Mountain, Roberts said.
“When you look at it on our map, you realize you can’t get there from here,” he said.
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.