This past summer, instead of strapping on bags filled with water bottles, sandwiches and trail mix, Google staffers slipped on backpacks outfitted with Google Trekkers, a strange blue sphere that hovers above one’s head and has big cut-outs for cameras that snap photos in all directions every few seconds. The employees hiked in 14 of California’s state parks, including Samuel P. Taylor, Tomales Bay State Park, Mount Tamalpais and China Camp. Thousands of images were assembled into trail versions of Google Street View that went live on Google Maps last week. Now, anyone with an internet connection can move, click by click, along trails such as the Cross Marin Trail, Devil’s Gulch Fire Road and Dispea Trail. Danita Rodriguez, the superintendent of the Bay Area District State Parks, said that the new maps allow people to “experi- ence the parks in a different way” and plan for hiking trips, as well as provide those with physical limitations a way to see more cumbersome trails. Hopefully, she said, the maps will also bring state parks to teens and young adults, some of whom spend less time in nature than past generations and more time tethered to their laptops or iPhones. “We’re trying to reach out, to make this relevant to these generations. It’s important for them to own and steward our parks… This is one way—bringing technology outdoors.” Or, depending on your perspective, bringing nature indoors. In the views offered through Google’s trail maps, the skies are always clear, the sun is always shining, mosquitos are never rampant, the ground is never too muddy. (Whether you can find yourself lost might depend on how you define that word.) A user can drag the screen 360 degrees around, glimpsing a view from a hillside trail into a valley, though it’s not quite possible to move off-trail a few inches for a better look. A simple tap briefly stretches the static image, as if the user is speeding through a wormhole, before suddenly jumping forward ten or twenty feet, to the next 360 degree view. Eye strain and tingly fingertips might be the worst injuries one could sustain after a few hours in this new version of the great outdoors.