“The Intrepid Mother and Son Who Unraveled a Geographic Hoax: Atlas Obscura Had a Page for Something Called Moose Boulder, Until Fan Roger Dickey Called Us on It.”, 2020-03-10 (; backlinks):
…What had brought them there, and into this rather dicey situation, was something called Moose Boulder, a kind of geological Matryoshka doll. Here’s what makes Moose Boulder special, from the outside in: Lake Superior is the world’s largest freshwater lake, and its largest island is Isle Royale, whose largest lake is called Siskiwit, whose largest island is called Ryan. According to Wikipedia, at least, Ryan Island is home to a seasonal pond called Moose Flats that, when flooded, contains its own island—Moose Boulder. This makes it “the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world.” Spoiler: Mother and son made it out alive, but it wasn’t because they stumbled on a geological/hydrological anomaly that they could use to get their bearings. They couldn’t have, because, despite what the internet has to say, Moose Boulder almost surely doesn’t exist.
…It’s doubtful that any of these other hikers, however, had consulted Atlas Obscura. Had they done so, Dickey soon realized, they would have found the precise coordinates: 48.0088°, −88.7720°. They would have seen that some people had marked visiting it on their Atlas Obscura profiles. Dickey had to get creative to actually contact these people. “I did Google reverse image search for their profile photos”, he says, which led him to two people with social media presences, neither of whom responded to his messages…Naturally, as they all do, the Atlas Obscura entry for the site had an image—albeit a grainy one—of a lonely little rock, cautiously jutting out of the water, feebly sprouting some weeds…Many photos that users upload to Atlas Obscura link to their original sources, but this one was a dead end. Using the Wayback Machine, Dickey found that it had come from a defunct website that appeared to document a geological research expedition to Ryan Island…The supposed photographic evidence had indeed come from that expedition, but it was merely a photo of an ordinary rock, off the coast of Isle Royale itself and not of the Inception of islands deep inside it.
By now, the odds seemed overwhelming to Dickey that Moose Boulder was a myth, a spasm of the Internet’s imagination that had managed to proliferate and live on. But still, something didn’t quite add up. There was a missing piece to the puzzle that stopped Dickey short of declaring it all a hoax. He had found another article about Moose Boulder, published in 2009, that cited Wikipedia as its source of information. But the information about Moose Boulder had been added to Siskiwit Lake’s Wikipedia page in 2012. It was like a scene in a bad horror movie in which someone gets a phone call from a dead person. Dickey joked with his girlfriend that perhaps Moose Boulder does exist, but only in some kind of “temporal anomaly.”…Here’s the rub: Wikipedia is a nesting doll, too. Before a page for Siskiwit Lake had been added to the site, the page for Isle Royale had pointed readers to Moose Boulder, and had been doing so since 2009. It was put there by a different user than the one who added it to the Siskiwit page in 2012. Either way, that’s where the trail goes cold, and there’s no other evidence that the place exists. The identity of that first Wikipedia user to write about it—with those completely unrelated sources—remains a mystery, but all available evidence suggests that it was a person having a laugh, nothing more.