Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains

A hiker went full detective mode to find the most hard-to-reach spot in Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains — basically, the place farthest from any road or trail — and then actually hiked out there and left a register for future bragging rights. On paper, it’s a wonderfully wholesome mix of maps, math, and outdoor chaos. In the comments, though, the real action is the classic internet combo of “this is awesome” and “well actually...”

The loudest reaction was admiration for the sheer dedication. One commenter immediately connected it to Project Remote, a family trying to visit the most remote place in every US state, giving the whole thing a slightly obsessive, adventure-documentary vibe. Another dropped in with a casual flex: they’d built a similar map for the entire United States at work, which made the thread feel like a surprise gathering of remote-place super-fans.

But then came the delicious drama: a commenter pointed out that the supposed “point of inaccessibility” now has a trail right next to it. Brutal. The catch? The trail was added to OpenStreetMap — the free community map — after the original analysis. So the crowd’s big takeaway became: the map isn’t wrong so much as the world keeps changing underneath it. That sparked a funny mini-meltdown about map data being a “moving target,” which is the kind of sentence only the internet could make sound scandalous.

There was also some local-color comedy, with one person explaining for non-Angelenos that these are the mountains looming behind downtown Los Angeles in photos — and, hilariously, maybe also for many LA locals who barely think about them. And in one of the thread’s weirder side notes, someone praised Claude, the AI chatbot, for “devouring ArcGIS maps” and finding hidden local patterns, because apparently even discussions about remote mountains now need an AI subplot.