Motivated by the dissipative abelian sandpile model, we analyze the trajectories of a one-dimensional random walk in a landscape of soft traps. These traps, placed at increasing distances from each other, correspond to dissipative sites in the associated dissipative abelian sandpile model. We identify a critical growth rate of the sizes of intervals between successive traps where there is a transition between finiteness and non-finiteness of the expected survival time of the random walk. This corresponds to a transition between non-criticality and criticality of the associated dissipative abelian sandpile model. Therefore, in this setting, we thus identify precisely how much dissipation can be added to the original abelian sandpile model in order to disrupt its criticality.