Take last weekend. Four of us -- two men and two women -- were skiing in the Colorado State Forest near Gould, heading for Jewel Lake. The trail wasn't marked, and the snow was untracked. When the apparent path through the trees suddenly vanished, we took off our packs and pulled out the topo maps.
As we studied them carefully, it became clear that the trail marked on the map wasn't the trail we were on.
"I think we're in the wrong drainage," said Mark.
Christine pointed to a spot on the map where the trail -- the real trail -- veered to the north and sharply across the contours. "Didn't someone mention a ways back that it looked like there was a trail branching off to the left? This might have been it."
We all nodded. There had been a clear swath of snow, angling up the slope of the mountain that now stood between us and the drainage that led to Jewel Lake. But it had been steep, and we'd been seduced by the gentle path that had led straight ahead. The wrong path.
To me, what we needed to do was obvious. "The junction we missed is only a half mile back and five hundred feet below us. We can ski back to it in five minutes and regain the altitude in fifteen. Twenty minutes total."
The men looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "Back down five hundred feet?" one said incredulously. The other stabbed a finger at the map. "Let's contour around the mountain instead, so we don't need to lose any elevation. It'll be much quicker."
"We're not very far from the trail junction," Christine ventured hesitantly.
"No way!" The men were adamant.
Christine and I looked at each other and shrugged, then shouldered our packs and began the difficult traverse around the mountain. Through the trees we trudged, dodging under branches and around stumps, edging our skis carefully into the steep slope that threatened to send us tumbling down several hundred feet at any moment. Keeping our elevation constant proved to be impossible; we moved up and down along the mountainside, avoiding cliffs and impassably dense stands of trees.
With hard work and careful skiing, we got to the far side of the mountain, above the creek which drained Jewel Lake. Finally, our route intersected an unmarked cut: the trail we should have been on in the first place.
The men looked triumphantly at me and Christine as we approached the trail. And I had to admit that their method had worked. We'd gotten to the correct trail...
...an hour later.