Rocky Ridge

Joe decided to do "pioneer things" on Saturday so we took off for the area where the Willie Handcart period in the church took place. This is where several members got caught in a blizzard and died.

We took a gravel/dirt/rock road called the Hudson-Atlantic City Road located off the main highway. It was advised that 4x4 vehicles be used, but we decided to see how far we could go without possibly having to turn around. (We made it the entire way. My car thinks it is 4 wheel drive). We almost met our match though when we came to Rocky Ridge.

These are some of the better portions of the road...
There was a youth group from Odgen, Utah who were doing a handcart trek.When we got to Rocky Ridge where there was evidence of wagon ruts, we encountered this sign. So, we had to get out and walk and walk and walk.

Joe standing in the ruts...and showing how deep some of them are.

Other ruts off in the distance...

That is our car waaaaaay off in the distance. The same distance we had to walk back to!

And Joe fell down and got boo-boos on his arm, bruised right shoulder and badly skinned knees. I'm beginning to think I can't take him anywhere.

Rocky Ridge came by its name naturally enough. This rugged, boulder-strewn path stretches for about 12 miles, across two high ridge shelfs, crossing Strawberry Creek and passing the old ghost town of Lewiston. At its summit, the trail ascends about 700 feet in two miles, causing the emigrants no small amount of grief. The rock cuts left here by the emigrant wagon wheels are among the most dramatic trail remnants remaining on Wyoming's westward emigrant trails.

Lots of the time we spent on "roads" like these the three pictures below. Calling it a road was really a stretch.

On the eastern edge of Rocky Ridge sits a monument to the misery endured here by Willie’s Handcart Company, a Mormon handcart company that became trapped on Rocky Ridge in October 1856. We never found the monument, but will look for it on another future trip.

I took this picture to show how dusty our car was getting and also look at the temperature and time.

When we were trying to cross Strawberry Creek out in the middle of the middle of nowhere, this is what we found at the bridge...

While on Rocky Ridge we noticed these off in the distance and drove to check them out. They are called cairns. A cairn is a manmade pile of stones, often in a conical form. They are usually found in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops or near waterways. These were very tall ones, but most of the ones I'd seen before are much shorter.

In modern times cairns are often erected as landmarks. In ancient times they were erected as sepulchral monuments, or used for practical and astronomical uses.

They are built for several purposes:
They may mark a burial site, and may memorialize the dead.
They may mark the summit of a mountain.
Placed at regular intervals, they indicate a path across stony or barren terrain or across glaciers.
In North America, cairns may mark buffalo jumps.

Out here they may be used as land markers and also used by sheepherders to mark territory.

When we finally came to the end of the road, several hours later, we got "temporarily misplaced". There were no signs or indicators of which direction to go and "Barking Bob" had no idea where we were either. I had to turn him off. We drove off in one direction and eventually found someone coming the opposite direction and stopped them. We were going the wrong way.

Because of the lateness of the day, we decided to forgo visiting Atlantic City and South Pass City and will save them for another weekend. I did go and show Joe the cabin that belongs to Trina's family way out in the middle of the forest and then we headed home after another long day.

(Joe had been wanting to see a big buck for the last two days and just before it became totally dark, I spotted one along side the road and turned around so he could see it. It was a large one with a very large rack).