Backcountry Scenic Drives: Emigrant Trails

Imagine yourself traveling the daunting distance from Kansas City to Sacramento…on foot. Now imagine your journey with no cars, no roads or bridges, no hotels or restaurants, no reliable maps—and certainly no GPS!

Over rugged mountains and barren deserts in hostile Indian Territory, your only mode of transport is horsepower—of the animal variety. Your only means of navigation is the sun.

Think it sounds impossible? In the 1830s and 40s, tens of thousands of people from the East didn’t. They risked their lives to claim free, fertile farmland in Oregon or hit the mother lode in California.

The Oregon Trail is the original and best known of all emigrant trails. Farmers established the route migrating west to Oregon. The other well known is the California Trail. A few settlers diverged from the Oregon Trail and headed south to California, establishing a southerly track.

In July 1846, Jacob Donner made a fateful decision. He led the Donner Party on a shorter, less traveled version of the California Trail. The legendary, disastrous expedition trekked through Utah’s Great Salt Desert. Amazingly, the group followed advice from a trail guide who had never attempted the route.

Unlucky and unwise, the group faced hardships day after day. They didn’t reach the towering Sierra Nevada Mountains until late October. They attempted crossing the range anyway. Early winter snows trapped the group in the mountains for the winter. Rescuers reached the debilitated party in March. Half of the original 87 had perished. Infamously, emigrants found alive committed cannibalism in order to survive.

As a result of such hazards, the California Trail was little used. In the mid-1840s, few migrants had settled in the Sacramento Valley. During the gold rush, traffic along the California Trail increased 50-fold. An estimated 30,000 to 45,000 emigrants traversed the trail that year.

You can experience sections of terrain crossed by the Donner-Reed Expedition today. Silver Island Mountains Loop Trail near Wendover, Utah crosses Donner-Reed Pass at its north end. This is an easy but remote track that illustrates the hardships the Donner Party would have faced. The beautiful and unusual scenery must have seemed hellacious to the party, struggling through the soft, muddy sand flats. Dozens of side tracks off the loop are interesting to explore.

An offshoot of the Oregon and California Trails was called the Applegate Trail. The Applegate family blazed this arduous trail after two family members drowned crossing the Columbia River. They swore they would find a faster and safer route into Oregon. The first emigrant party to use the track proved theirs was neither.

After the disastrous journey, Oregon settlers condemned the route. It was longer than the original and crossed treacherous Indian Territory over rugged and barren terrain. Emigrants abandoned the route. The only subsequent traffic was Oregon prospectors rushing south to the California goldfields.

Portions of the historic Applegate Trail can be driven today. One part of original trail is on the Surprise Valley Trail, in the extreme northeastern corner of California. This tricky piece of road climbs up and over a rocky ridge embedded with large boulders. Keep an eye out for wild mustangs that roam the area today.

The nearby Fandango Pass 4WD Trail also crosses the original Applegate Trail. Many settlers and miners lost their lives here, attempting to cross the Warner Mountains. Historical markers indicate these stretches of historic trail.

Henness Pass Road presented migrants with a better way to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This new pass crossed into California further north than Donner Pass, avoiding harsh terrain around Truckee Lake. Henness Pass was such a good alternative that it was later improved into a wagon road.

Most of the original route of Henness Pass Road can be driven today. For high clearance 4wd vehicles, Henness Pass Road is a long, easy, and scenic drive. Along the trail are many historic emigrant campsites and stage stop sites. Although most are little more that sites, the large number of them reveals how busy the road must have been.

Lesser known, is the Mormon migration. The religious group pressed west searching for a home free of religious persecution. Salt Lake Valley was the perfect place. Soon overpopulation forced settlement expansion. Blazing a route across south Utah, they encountered Hole-in-the-Rock Pass: a 1,200-foot gorge to the Colorado River.

With no feasible way around it, they had to pass through it. They blasted boulders, widened the crevice walls, and graded a path, creating a series of roads along the cliff edges. An amazing feat of engineering, they tacked a road onto the sheer face of the gorge by chiseling holes into the rock and inserting log supports. The result was a 50-foot wooden road. They planned 6 weeks for the expedition. It took them more than 6 months.

A long, interesting 4-wheel drive trail in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument travels sections of the historic Mormon Pioneer Trail. Slickrock sections in the trail’s last 5 miles require short, steep climbs and careful wheel placements. It’s only a short scramble at the end of the trail to the Hole-in-the-Rock site. The enormity of the work of the early pioneers is still obvious. You can still see scrapes from the wagons that descended through the Hole-in-the-Rock on the sides of the passage.