The Hot Pocket Adventure

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Dena & I were doing fine until we came to a "T" intersection in the orange snow poles marking the trail. Which way to go? To the right, it didn't look like where we'd originally crossed the highway, but it was the highway .. to the left didn't look like anywhere we'd been earlier in the day ... "just follow the orange poles" ... um ... OK? So I pulled out the cell phone thinking we'd messed up and one of the guys could set us straight. I left messages on 4 phones.

We sat & thought a bit. We discussed & reasoned a bit. We finally made another call "we're trying the right branch". And off we went. Across the highway, up the canyon. It sort of looked familiar. But then again it didn't. Eventually we came to an area we both knew we'd never seen before & went back to the orange poles T intersection.

Another phone call - "that didn't work, we'll wait here a while for you to catch up or call us". And we sat a while, talking. And we studied the map. We could see where we were and where we needed to be, but not how to get there.

Another phone call - "we're going to try the left branch". This one didn't take near as long to prove to be new territory. Again, we could see the highway, but it was clearly not the part of the highway we needed to find. Back to the junction. Along the way we talked to a couple. The fellow "thought" he could get us back to our parking area. "Think" wasn't good enough. We thanked them. We encountered a group (a tour, perhaps) and asked if they knew the trail to take back. Nope.

Another phone call. "we're back at the junction, we've tried both branches and we don't know what else to do". Then a couple of guys came along. They offered us a "Hot Pocket". We were both hungry, but polite & turned it down the first time. The guy carrying it said he didn't want to eat it or carry it back. We accepted it and shared it and enjoyed every bit of it. They thought about it and we described where we'd crossed the road, where we'd first played. We thought of it as a parking area; they called it the campground. Either way, we were talking about the only bathroom in the area, so it was the same place.

Another phone call. "We're following a couple of guys who can get us back to where we crossed the road." Off we went ... straight ahead where there were no orange poles! In just a few minutes everything looked familiar again. We crossed along the back of the campground, past the restroom & out the first meadow we'd played in hours before. We thanked the guys & they went off to run the meadow. We headed across the road and back to the parking lot. I was never so glad to see a power line (only real landmark between campground and parking area) along a trail!.

After all that ... we were the first ones back. One last phone call "we made it back". All along, we kept going back to the last known "good spot" and left a message for our group so they'd know what we were doing. We were never "lost", we just had incomplete directions back to the road.