CANNONVILLE, Utah — A GPS device led a convoy of tourists astray, finally stranding them on the edge of a sheer cliff.

With little food or water, the group of 10 children and 16 adults from California had to spend a night in their cars deep inside the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

They used a global positioning device to plot out a backcountry route Saturday from Bryce Canyon National Park to the Grand Canyon.

But the device couldn’t tell how rough the roads were. One vehicle got stuck in soft sand, two others ran low on fuel. And the device offered suggestions that led them onto the wrong dirt roads, which ended at a series of cliffs.

The group was so lost it couldn’t figure out how to backtrack and started to panic. Kids were crying, and one infant was sick with fever, according to a member of the party.

“It was a nightmare — the vacation from hell,” Daniel Cohen, back home safely in Los Angeles, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “That’s a story I will tell my kids. For now, I don’t want anybody to know about it.”

WHAT TO TAKE AWAY FROM THIS ARTICLE:

With little food or water, the group of 10 children and 16 adults from California had to spend a night in their cars deep inside the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
They used a global positioning device to plot out a backcountry route Saturday from Bryce Canyon National Park to the Grand Canyon.
CANNONVILLE, Utah — A GPS device led a convoy of tourists astray, finally stranding them on the edge of a sheer cliff.