Here is where the real story begins. The dotted line on the map shows the trail as provided on my mapping software. The blue pin on the far right is the trailhead where we parked the car. The red flag on the left was to be our base camp (not the red cone near the bottom of the image).
As we hiked along the trail (west), you'll notice a split in the black lines. The black lines represent the route we walked as recorded by my GPS. At the point where the black line splits, the trail had intersected the stream and to continue would mean hiking through nearly a foot of water. I decided since the trail shown by the mapping software shows us crossing the stream just ahead, I'd cross here to avoid getting wet and pickup the trail further up. This was our first mistake.
The trail as shown by the mapping software (dotted line) was clearly drawn by crack smoking liberals from the Sierra Club. In fact, the trail continues nearly another mile on the south side of the creek before you cross. Blazing our own way over boulders, shrubs and snakes we eventually found a set of ducks (For you non-hikers, ducks are piles of rocks your predecessors left to mark the route. The official term is "cairns," but I've rarely heard hikers use the official term). The ducks appear approximately where the two black lines merge again. I followed the ducks a short way, but lost the trail again. By this time Andra was so tired from following the long legged trailblazer, she frowned on going up when up wasn't guaranteed to be the correct route. Therefore, without seeing any sure signs of the trail we took the lower more southern route (black line). This was mistake number two. It doesn't look like it at this scale, but there is approximately 200 feet between the two routes.
Near the top of the saddle, we picked up the trail again and continued west toward our intended base camp location. By this time, we had been hiking for more than five hours under extremely difficult and exhausting conditions. The original plan was to cross the final saddle at the low point cutting straight across to the base camp. However, having followed the trail slightly too far, the terrain was too steep and boulder strewn to cross. I also could not figure out where the trail went from here. I think it probably continued along at this elevation and around the knob, but I'm really not sure.
The intense trail blazing had left me dehydrated and nearly out of water. The sun was going down and the loss of light meant boulder navigation would become too dangerous. I decided the smart thing to do was to stop sweating so much, take off our packs, assess our water reserves, and camp out for the night. From this vantage point, I could see the river we must cross to reach our base camp and it was raging like a crazy buffalo.
After dropping our packs, I find I have about 10 ounces of water left, but fortunately, Andra still has about 45. I tell Andra that in the morning I'll either need to descend to the river or return to where I marked some water pools (puddles) along the trail.