A Navigator's Challenge

My friend Jeff picked me up at 8 am and we burned up I-40 driving to Grants. We had no problems until we put a couple of miles behind us on the dirt road FR-193. We took a right at a fork and ended up driving away from the mountain for about a mile, so we turned around and took the left turn at the fork in the road. I tried to judge where the Gooseberry Springs Trailhead would be with the aid of the GPS and the Topozone map I printed out. We ended up driving all the way to Canovitas Canyon and had to turn around. We looked for any trail all the way to the fork and found only a couple very faint trails that didn’t look promising. We noticed another dirt road near the fork that was closed and how the track on the GPS didn’t match the layout of FR-193. Again, we doubled back and gave up after a mile or so, parked and began walking up a ridge near to where we thought the trail ought to be. We followed the ridge for about a mile and noticed some cliffs to the north and made an effort to locate a passage through them. It took only a several minutes of walking below the cliffs to find the hole. After a steep climb onto the cliffs, we continued up another ridge into the open areas southwest of the summit. We came upon several cow elk and managed to shoot them with the camera. Above a couple more rises on the ridge, we encountered the trail and followed it up the rest of the way. We decided to hike the trail all the way down to the road to see where we would end up. When we arrived, it came to our attention that the trail was one of the faint ones leading off the road. We built two Cairns at the beginning of the trail and walked the .6 miles back to the Jeep, returning at 3 pm.