After waiting for almost another month for an exit visa and then spending at least two more weeks breaking the horses they had purchased for the return trip, Smith's party left the mission communities of California in mid-February 1827. The party headed out the way it had come, but once outside the Mexican settlements, Smith convinced himself he had complied with Echeandía's order to leave by the same route he had entered, and the party veered north crossing over into the Central Valley. The party ultimately made its way to the Kings River on February 28 and began trapping beaver. The party kept working its way north, encountering hostile Maidus. By early May 1827, Smith and his men had traveled north looking for the Buenaventura River, but they found no break in the wall of the Sierra Nevada range through which it could have flowed from the Rocky Mountains. On December 16, 1826, Smith had written in a letter to the United States ambassador plenipotentiary to Mexico his plans to "follow up on of the largest Riv(ers) that emptied into the (San Francisco) Bay cross the mon (mountains) at its head and from thence to our deposit on the Great Salt Lake" and appeared to be following that plan. They followed the Cosumnes River (the northernmost tributary of the San Joaquin River) upstream, but veered off it to the north and crossed over to the American River, a tributary of the Sacramento that flowed into San Francisco Bay. They tried traveling up the canyon of the South Fork of the American to cross the Sierra Nevada but had to return because the snow was too deep. Unable to find a feasible path for the well-laden party to cross and faced with hostile indigenes, he was forced into a decision: since they did not have time to travel north to the Columbia and make it in time to the 1827 rendezvous, they would backtrack to the Stanislaus River and re-establish a camp there. Smith would take two men and some extra horses to get to the rendezvous as quickly as he could and return to his party with more men later in the year, and the group would continue on to the Columbia.