As often as not, the trail or river experience keeps the person from seeing things instead of allowing them to see them. Wilderness experience is powerfully distorted in the array and cost of the equipment that both makes possible access to remote areas and at the same time insulates our minds from the experience of the area. I have seen students in full catalog gear that would serve to protect them in any wilderness on earth stand on a mountain top to watch a sunrise and be unable to point to south when I told them which way we would be hiking. This kind of natural illiteracy is dangerous both in the wilderness and in society. Of course, if they stay on the trail and follow the person ahead of them, they won't get lost.
Most trails eventually go somewhere.
That is not the problem. The problem is the mental cocoon that insulates their mind better than their polyfill does their bodies from the experience of what is around them. That cocoon keeps them from knowing that they are already part of the world that they stare at externally as observers. It is not just that they lack the information or lore. Knowledge can always be supplied by precept, instruction, manual, and carefully constructed experience.