How does a navigator get lost?

I’ll just skip over the next couple of weeks quickly because they were a nightmare that took 5 years off my life.  

My Associate Navigator (whom you see here, looking as if bad behavior is as foreign to him as quantum mechanics) got picked up twice by well-meaning citizens because they thought he was lost as he bounced happily through the forest (and probably back and forth across the highway) on exploratory journeys. The last, most traumatic episode lasted three interminable days and nights. 

The first day, I rode my trike for 23 miles around the Gila National Forest (which is beautiful, btw) looking for him or anyone who had seen him. The cool thing about that (which I failed to document in pictures…I was in no mood for ‘cool’) is that I rode over the Continental Divide twice.

The second day I drove to the pound in Silver City NM, but it is closed on Mondays so I sat in the Walmart parking lot for a while worrying, and then drove back to the Gila NF in case Shadow had magically returned. The third day, I rode down to the ranger station (that’s only 7 miles) to post signs and talk to the NFS staff. The fourth day, I returned to the Silver City pound and found him (of course) chasing his tail like a maniac and shedding blood all over the cell walls <shudder>. Let us move on.