SUMMARY:  We were very determined to get in lots of miles today, and at first all went pretty well. We were in snowshoes right from the get-go, and were doing well at spotting cairns. But the snow here is so soft that even with snowshoes, we were sinking in and postholing, which made for some slow going. Then around 11:00am, we found ourselves at the edge of a big dropoff looking at a lake far below, and realized, “Oh no, we missed a turn. We are supposed to be on top of that mountain behind the lake!”

So we backtracked a bit, climbed straight up the snowy slope, and got back on the trail. But our whole hard morning’s work—5 miles. Pathetic. Only have 1 1/4 days of food left. We will never make it.

So we decided to bail out by going down the Navajo River canyon. It took us 5 hours to get to the bottom, due to avoiding cliffs and dealing with snow. We hope to cross the river in the morning when it is less roary.

DETAILS:  We were very hopeful this morning that we’d be able to make good miles today to make up for our pathetic mileage so far–only around 20 miles done, and 40-plus left to go.  It was pretty cold, though not outrageously brrrrrr, considering that we were completely surrounded by snow.  Right from the start, we were wearing our snowshoes, and were doing quite well at spotting cairns.   The vast snowy expanse, and the high peaks were spectacular, and we were awed at so much amazing scenery.  The only bummer was endless postholing, even with our snowshoes on.  Sometimes we’d come to snowmelt marshes, and had to just walk right through them.   Brrrr, cold wet feet!

I was trying very hard to watch the maps and keep track of the trail, but it was hard with so many relatively similar mountains and ridges all around us.  Late in the morning, despite my best efforts at navigation, we missed a very important turn, and  found ourselves at the edge of a big dropoff, looking down at a lake far below.  Oh no!  We’re not supposed to be here!  The one good thing was that now we knew exactly where we were, and that the trail was way up high on a mountain on the OTHER SIDE of the lake.  To get there meant a big backtrack (there was no way down the dropoff) and then a walk straight up the side of a steep ridge. (I love my MSR snowshoes for this kind of thing–they really grip the snow and don’t slip and slide.)  At the top of the ridge, we finally managed to locate the trail again, and it was back to following cairns–slow going because the cairns are so far apart, and it’s hard to spot them.

We stopped for lunch on a rocky ridgetop surrounded by snowy mountains.  Besides eating, I was consulting maps and Fixit was consulting Guthook.  I was able to figure out from the maps pretty much exactly where we were, but we were very worried, because we couldn’t figure out how to make Guthook match our maps.  As best I could tell, for our whole morning’s hike, we’d only made 5 miles.  That is beyond pathetic, and it leaves 37 miles to go, and only 1 1/4 days of food in our packs.  At this rate, we will never make it to Wolf Creek Pass.  If we were on good, clear trail, 37 miles would be no problema, but a look ahead showed us a whole lot more of what we’d already been struggling through.  Obviously we had no choice:  we had to bail out.  But NO WAY did we want to go back to Chama.  What could we do?

One of the maps I was using (Trails Illustrated) was originally very large, but I had trimmed it down drastically to save weight and bulk.  Looking closely at it, just next to the trimmed edge, I spotted a dirt ROAD, way down at the bottom of a fork of the Navajo River canyon that was just up ahead of us. If we could bushwhack down the canyon to the road, we could eventually work our way out to the highway and roadwalk to Pagosa Springs.

So that’s what we did.  It took us from 1 pm until 6 pm to get off the ridge and down to the Navajo River.   At first it wasn’t too bad–somewhat steep snowy hillsides that we could negotiate in our snowshoes–but eventually we reached steep cliffs and had to figure out how to get past them.  Finally we got to treeline and were back in the forest.  At that point, we stowed our snowshoes, because it was so steep and so rough, that even though there was still a lot of snow, and yes, we did still posthole a bit (I had to dig myself out of baaaad postholes twice!) we found that just going in our hiking shoes worked better.  Finally we were out of the snow and following a cute little creek down a side canyon, heading for the main Navajo River.  Everything was wet and sloshing with snowmelt.

Down we went, and the farther down we got, the bigger the cute little creek became.  We decided we’d better cross it before it got any worse, and if even this little side creek was raging and roaring, the main river would probably be pretty bad.  We knew we had to cross the river to get to the road.   At last we reached the floor of the main canyon and headed to the Navajo River.  My heart sank when I looked at it.  “There’s no way we can get across this,” I thought.  Even Fixit, who is very fearless about river crossings, was dubious.  We decided to try walking upstream a ways, hoping to find a wider, flatter place where hopefully the current would slow down and it would not be too deep.  A half hour or so of walking, and we spotted a crossing place that looked barely do-able, maybe.  Fixit actually got into the river and tested it to see how strong the current was.  He climbed out and said, “It’s pretty bad, but let’s camp now and try crossing early in the morning.”  (In case you’re not familiar with snowmelt river crossings in the mountains, early morning is when the water level is at its lowest, and late afternoon, it’s at its highest)

Finding a campsite was not easy.  Every bit of ground was literally running with snowmelt (which explained why the river was so roaring!).  Plants were sprouting everywhere, and things were very green.  But I finally found a small, level, DRY patch of pineneedly ground under a tree up on a hill above the river.  Now we’re in our tent listening to the roar of the river and praying like crazy that we can make it across tomorrow.