Day 23 – 5/15/13 – 20.5 mi (417.1)

Oh where to start. We had a good morning with the Mumms dropping us off at the end of town where we’d been picked up yesterday. They kept our packs so we could slack the 8 miles through town without the weight. With about a mile left we called and they met us with our packs at the trailhead up to Mt Taylor. Thank you Mumms for all the help and water caches! Grants would be a real pain to get around without their help.

I left the trailhead with Ninja, Love Note, Strider, Wired, and Sweetfish. It was nice to be on actual trail and after a couple miles of climbing we got up on a flat bench with great views of Grants.

We planned to camp shortly after the final water cache stocked by the Mumms. Ninja and I were ahead by several minutes and looking at our maps, decided to take a more direct forest service road the final half mile to the cache. Of course this tale ends in this not being a shortcut at all. We walked down the road a bit then consulted the GPS. In the end, we were not on the road we thought we were on due to a labeling error on the map. We cross countried it to the spot on the map where the cache was supposed to be. Except the map was wrong about that too. Apparently we weren’t listening very well when the Mumms explained where the cache was. I finally got a hold of Wired on her phone. The cache was actually back where we’d initially turned off the road. The others had waited there for a while for us to come back. When we didn’t, they split up, the boys following our tracks down the wrong road, the girls going the correct way to try to round us up. We all converged at the spot the cache was marked on the map. Everyone had pitched in and brought extra water for me and Ninja. We owe our friends big!

We got to the intended campsite, quite a bit late due to our misadventure, and enjoyed a nice sunset with a chorus of constipated (I’m assuming) cows mooing from the stands of aspens around us.

The Daily Ninjup Report
Her eyes were perhaps a bit bigger than her belly yesterday, and Ninja had to spend all morning before we left eating, even while doing 6 push-ups.