While Adam waited, and began to get worried, I was happily walking along lake after lake - 4 beautiful bodies of water in all - wondering why on earth Adam wouldn't have stopped for lunch at one of these beautiful locations. As I walked I got more and more confused and frustrated. Adam LOVES stopping at lakes. Surely he wouldn't be so into crunching miles that he bypassed all four of these! But on I trudged until our planned lunch time. And when I finally stopped walking, sat down and started calling Adam's name, I finally accepted what I had begun to suspect: I was most certainly not on the PCT. Now, this wasn't a huge problem for me. I had everything I needed to survive, and plenty of water and I was on a trail. I knew I would be fine. The only thing I didn't have was a map (as those were in a box that we never received because of the fires). And the bigger problem was that Adam did not know I was fine.
While I was enjoying my hike through the wrong woods, poor Adam was walking back and forth from the trail junction I had gotten off on, and the spot a mile down the trail where he had stopped to meet me. Other hikers said they hadn't seen me, and he didn't know what to do to find me. Finally, he decided to run down the Sky Lakes Trail (literally run) hoping I had gone down there and he would catch me.
Eventually, I turned around and began hiking back to find where I had gone astray, and Adam ran far enough down the trail (past all four lakes) to run into me. Needless to say, we have never been so happy to see each other. We actually cried. And then we began the long (4 mile) uphill walk back to the PCT. Whoops!