... and before long total darkness descended. The moon had long since set and wasn't due to reappear until late into the evening. After finding a decent use trail for at least a mile, we lost track of it in the darkness. Unable to find our path from this morning, we made a two fateful group-think decisions: 1.to head directly toward the river in the bottom of the valley to regain our bearings and hopefully cross the path we had used in the morning and 2. upon reaching a river in an unlikely and surprising location to conclude it was a tributary and cross it. The upshot of this was becoming completely and irreversibly lost in a swampy, cold, dark overgrown forest with a dispute over cardinal directions of the greatest degree: that is to say 180 of them.