Bryce Vincent Gowryluk, 16, left his house in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday for what he expected to be a challenging, eight-hour hike along steep rock from the top of Grouse Mountain to nearby Crown Mountain and back.
Bryce, who hikes regularly and goes to an indoor rock climbing gym four or five times a week, had been to the top of Crown Mountain before but had never taken this route, which he planned with the help of Claude, Anthropic’s A.I. chatbot.
Things did not go as he had hoped.
Carrying a 20-pound backpack stuffed with climbing shoes, a harness, two bottles of water, a helmet and other gear, he rode a gondola to the top of Grouse Mountain, a 4,100-foot peak overlooking Vancouver.
From there, he climbed along a strenuous, rocky trail before descending into a valley filled with boulders. With no trail markings to guide him, he headed into what he believed was the Crown Couloir, a difficult route up the side of Crown Mountain, which rises nearly 5,000 feet above sea level.
Instead, he had accidentally entered the Widowmaker Arete, a steep exposed rock on the face of Crown Mountain, which generally requires ropes and other climbing gear to ascend.
“That was my mistake; that was my error,” Bryce said in an interview.
He used his hands as well as his feet to climb up the Widowmaker, believing he was in the Crown Couloir, but the terrain “just progressively got harder and harder until it was too sketchy to climb down,” he said.
Bryce had found himself face to face with the Widowmaker’s headwall, a nearly vertical cliff. He was standing on a patch of dirt about five feet wide, he said, with a steep drop behind him and a steep cliff in front of him.
“I am trapped on a ledge,” he said. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”
Bryce called his mother, Joelle Gowryluk, who encourages his passion for climbing but has urged him never to do it alone. He told her that he was stuck and that he was going to call North Shore Rescue, a volunteer search-and-rescue team in Vancouver.
Ms. Gowryluk said she started praying.
“He had very good intentions going in, of just spending the day in nature and challenging himself in nature,” she said, “but it’s never the call that a parent wants — that he needs a helicopter rescue.”
Bryce called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who alerted North Shore Rescue. The service contacted Bryce on his cellphone, pinpointed his location and dispatched a helicopter crew.
As Bryce waited on the ledge, two rock climbers who had heard him screaming for help gave him a granola bar and a space blanket, and he gave them a headlamp they needed. They chatted, and Bryce reassured himself that he was physically capable of standing on the ledge without falling.
After about an hour, the helicopter arrived, but it could not get close enough to Bryce to rescue him without its rotors hitting the mountain.
Two rescuers eventually dropped onto the cliff above Bryce. One of them used a rope to climb down to him, and guided him to another point, where the helicopter could approach. From there, the rescuers hoisted Bryce in a harness onto the helicopter.
Bryce called them heroes. “They saved me,” he said.
Bryce “wasn’t equipped for climbing,” said Paul Markey, a North Shore Rescue search manager. “He was well equipped for adventurous hiking, and didn’t expect to get himself into that situation. He was very, very frightened, and scared for his life.”
Bryce said he did not blame Claude for pointing him to Widowmaker Arete. It was his own mistake, he said, and he had also used Google Maps, AllTrails and other tools to plan his route.
Mr. Markey, 67, who has been climbing for more than five decades, said he told Bryce after the rescue that he should not rely on A.I. to plan his routes and that he should climb with a partner.
“I said to him, ‘Claude has never been in that area,’” Mr. Markey said, adding that hikers who are tempted to use A.I. “need to have some good practical knowledge.”
“You need to have some common sense and some good decision-making when looking at the suggestions being proposed,” he said.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.
Bryce said he was not going to give up climbing. One of his goals, he said, is to become the youngest Canadian to reach the summit of Mount Everest. (A 20-year-old woman from Ontario did it in 2008.) But the experience has changed his view of artificial intelligence.
“I’d still use A.I. for stuff like business and booking meetings and learning new things,” Bryce said. “But for trails? No. Never again. Never, never again.”
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