I am very happy that everything turned out for the best. The same thing almost happened to my wife and I last October. We took a month long trip from Florida to many places out west, especially Utah. Microsoft Streets and Trips did the same thing to us. I always use Streets and Trips to lay out a trip because it allows you to program overnights, time for sightseeing, eating, etc. It wanted us to travel from Escalante to Big Water by the same Smokey Mountain Road. When I put the route into Mapsource, Garmin's mapping program, to program my GPS, it showed the same route. However, I got suspicious when Mapsource showed it as a broken line, which means unpaved. Since we are from Florida and not used to mountain driving, I then checked out all of the roads in our route that were not Interstates, US Highways, or state highways to make sure that we could traverse them. What I found was that this road ran mainly through the middle of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Mounment, a BLM property. This is a relativley new monument with mainly very rugged roads and almost no development. In fact the BLM map shows this road as an ATV road. I even looked at the road on Google Maps satellite view and I could see that it was very rugged. I found this to be true all over the southwest, especially BLM properties. BTW, the BLM calls it Smokey Mountain Road where the mapping programs and Google Maps calls part of it Missing Canyon Road. By either name, it goes from Big Water to Escalante. If they were 45 miles from Bigwater, they were definitely in BLM territory and only about 21 miles from Escalante. I am amazed they got that far in a sedan.

The problem seems to be with Navteq, the company that supplies the mapping for Garmin and Streets and Trips among others. They seem to consider these unpaved roads as viable routes regardless of condition. Also, the newer and cheaper GPS units only allow you to put in your destination and it picks the route. My old Streetpilot and my new Nuvi 750 allow me to make up the route.

The lesson here is to research where you are going and to check with the Ranger stations about current conditions. Had they done their research, they could have used the route avoidance procedures available in most GPS units.