The performance of geographic routing protocols is largely determined by the routing holes from which they must recover. In this paper we examine routing hole characteristics. In simulations of large networks of varying size and placement strategy we investigate (1) the size of routing holes, (2) the number of hops needed to escape from a routing hole, and (3) the likelihood of encountering a routing hole as a function of distance. Our results show the distribution of hops required to map a hole is skewed toward smaller values (/spl les/ 10 hops), and that the majority of holes can be circumvented in 4 hops or less. Interestingly, we find the probability of encountering a routing hole to be greatly affected by the distance in all but uniformly generated networks.