Friday, September 29, 2006

Day 4 -- Great America WY to Torrington WY

Traces of Travelers...

We super-slabbed it across most of Wyoming today, and as I mentioned before, the average speed was well north of 90 MPH. On several occasions while passing trucks, the speedo exceeded the 100 mark; luckily my passenger either didn't notice, or didn't say anything for fear I would slow down and subject her to more minutes of Wyoming monotony :-) Roxy, our Infiniti FX-35 took the high speeds in stride, and only asked for a little more fuel than usual. Oh, and we did all this through head winds of at least 30 MPH. The ride was smooth and stable, and the aerodynamics of the FX seemed to prevent the buffeting I have experienced in previous similar situations.

After a late lunch / early dinner, we headed North on I-25 to trace the route of the Oregon Trail and the Platte River along US-26. Somewhere before the Fort Laramie historic site, in the middle of the small town of Guernsey, we followed signs to "Wagon Wheel Ruts" and discovered the really neat site that contains "Register Cliff" and real wagon ruts left by those who traveled the Oregon Trail many years ago. I say "real" because most such sites have wide U-shaped channels where many wagons went over the same area, such as a steep descent, and the animals pulling the wagons, and the wagon wheels, combined with years of water erosion, leave channels, not individual wheel ruts. These ruts, however, were different. The ruts are in solid stone. Yes, the steel-tired wagon wheels, thousands of them, cut deep ruts down into solid rock, sometimes two or more feet deep. One particular place still showed what was obviously a place where every draft animal placed it's right foot when starting the ascent up a steep rise. It, too, had to have been worn down from thousands of feet trying to find purchase while pulling the heavy loads. The effort required to make the journey from meeting places such as Saint Louis to eventual ends in Oregon, Utah, and Northern California is astounding, and took a heavy toll. Cholera was common, and all along the way we saw reminders that not all who started the journey made it all the way. At Register Cliff many travelers left their names and date of passage carved in the sandstone cliff, and one in particular is known to have died just a few weeks and 70 miles further down the trail, struck down in the prime of life by cholera. Yes, that's several weeks for 70 miles. Sometime the settlers made only 3 miles a day.

Marilyn and I were discussing what things we have now, things the settlers could have comprehended, that they would have been most impressed with. She thinks it would be the roads we have today. They would be familiar in concept, and they could use them with the technology they possessed, yet could go so much further using them as compared to hacking their way through prairie or struggling up rocky hills. Roads, more than anything else, I think, made this country into the magnificent thing it is today. President Eisenhower is credited with being the father of the Interstate System, but even the great roads that were replaced, such as Route 66 (The Mother Road), the Lincoln Highway, the Yellowstone Trail, the Sunset Highway, and the National Road, to name a few, were more than some countries have today. Before, 3 miles a day, now, and I have done it when I was younger and stupider, 1000 miles a day -- could the Oregon Trail users comprehend three orders of magnitude increase in daily mileage? I wonder....

We, ourselves, made nearly 500 miles on this day and still had time to spend 3 hours exploring the traces left by others.

Unfortunately, no photos, as it appears the camera memory card acted up. The images come up in thumbnail, but won't display. I hope I can find or write a utility to salvage them.

I did find this site, however, and with Daniel's permission, I include a link here. The site contains pictures of well-known sites along the Oregon Trail, and both the Register Cliff name carvings and the wagon wheel ruts cut in stone:

http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~hyde/jackson/lindaOregonTrip.html

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I had to take my Stuartweitzman shoes off to climb the cliffs.