After an easy breakfast on the roadside, we began quickly gaining elevation again. We had thought we were done with Mongolian mountains, but we had another high-elevation day of adventures to look forward to. As we got higher up the roads became trails and the trails became paths, and pretty soon we had no indicators of which direction was correct. The paths split and came back together like the channels of a braided river, with an occasional path splitting off into the distance on its own. The landscape, though beautiful, was so monotonous at times that it was easy to accidentally split off the main track, and evidently that’s what we did sometime before lunchtime.
Once we had eaten a good meal and were thinking clearly again, we spent the afternoon navigating back to the main “road” just in time for a river crossing. At first glace our troop of small cars was intimidated by the Toyota Land Cruiser sitting unmoving in the middle of the current; luckily for us, however, it turns out the Land Cruiser coincidentally had engine trouble in the stream, and for us the water barely made it halfway up our doors! We pulled over to camp shortly after our river, and celebrated our successful day of route-finding and riving-crossing by watching a beautiful sunset with Daniel and enjoying an evening under an extremely bright full moon.