The Wind River Range and Basin

 When we left Casper, Wyoming, we were trying to find Wyoming 220 to continue to follow the Oregon-California Trail. But we took a wrong turn somewhere, so we had to backtrack, and found that the road we wanted was called Cy Road in town. Nice they named a street after our son (or maybe after Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the thresher, who can say?)

We found our way out of town, heading west, and passed Red Buttes, some big red bluffs that were a landmark along the trail for the emigrants, as they had been for the Indians as well. Nearer to the trail along the Red Buttes was the North Platte, still wandering cross country, and Bessemer Bend, one of the last places that it was possible to cross the river without paying a toll for a ferry or bridge. (And some times the toll was quite exorbitant, whatever the traffic would bear.)

Red Buttes, just outside Casper, Wyoming,
was a landmark on the Oregon Trail

Then we came upon Independence Rock, which is something to see. It’s a huge lump of granite in the middle of a plain, so you can’t miss it. People carved their names in it as they walked along the Oregon Trail, too, but it was a lot harder to cut into the granite than the sandstone at Register Cliffs. Some used paint to make the names stand out, but the paint is all worn away, and you can just read some of the inscriptions now. In 1860, the explorer Sir Richard Burton visited Independence Rock and calculated that 50,000 to 60,000 people had left their names on the rock in the past decade. In 1906, Ezra Meeker, who had come across the Oregon Trail in 1851, when he was 21, followed the trail west to east in a Conestoga wagon again when he was 76, drumming up support along the way to preserve the path of the trail. And many communities did; a lot of towns and counties marked the trail with stone markers from about 1912 to 1918. They are still there today, along with a large inscription on Independence Rock that he carved and painted that says THE OREGON TRAIL, with dates that I can’t quite remember.

Independence Rock and some of the signatures left by Oregon Trail travelers

The story is that William Sublette, that fur trader from Fort Laramie, camped near the rock on July 4, 1830, when he was leading the first wagon train across the Continental Divide. Wherever the name came from, travelers believed that if they reached Independence Rock by the Fourth of July, Independence Day, they would make it over the mountains before the first snows of the season. It also roughly marked the halfway point on the Oregon Trail, measuring from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon.

Not too far past Independence Rock, we came across a sign for Devil’s Gate and Martin’s Cove. I though both were farther from the road, but there was a place to view both along Route 220. Martin’s Cove was known as the site where the Willie Handcart Company, a group of Mormons on their way to Salt Lake City, were caught by an early snowstorm. They took refuge in the cove, but it was still a bad situation; about one-fifth of the group of more than 500 died before help arrived from Salt Lake City.

Devil’s Gate, with Martin’s Cove in foreground

Other sites along the route were past the point where we switched from Route 220 to U.S. 287 to head up to Lander, Wyoming, our destination for the night. We saw Split Rock, another Oregon Trail landmark, and stopped for lunch at Sweetwater Station, on the Sweetwater River. The water was still tasty, and some prairie dogs joined us for lunch.

A friendly prairie dog enjoying some lunch with us

As we headed northwest to Landen, the Wind River Range of snowcapped mountains was our view out the windshield, which was lovely. When we arrived at the Sleeping Bear Campground right outside Landen proper, we found a lovely, if somewhat windy, campsite and had our dinner, with ice cream from the camp store for dessert. Perfect!

The snowcapped Wind River Range and the view from our campsite in Lander

We backtracked a few miles from Landen, Wyoming, to pick up the road to South Pass, which is how the wagon trains crossed the Continental Divide. Although it’s at an elevation of almost 7,000 feet, it’s a 30-mile-wide flat place between the Wind River Mountains and the Antelope Hills, easy enough for Conestoga wagons and vans pulling campers to make it over the Great Divide. So we’re on the downhill run to the West Coast now.

The South Pass was the only way over the Continental
Divide that wagons could safely cross

From South Pass City, an old almost-abandoned mining town just off the main road, we went to Farson, where we stopped to have lunch at a rather desolate city park with a shelter and a lot of sagebrush. Then on down to Rock Springs/Green River, two towns on I-80, which we needed to take for about 35 miles to pick up U.S. 30 into Idaho. The wagon trains would go off in different directions somewhere between South Pass and Fort Bridger, located near where I-80 is today in western Wyoming. The California Trail turned south, the Mormon Trail went straight on into Utah, and the Oregon Trail heads north for a bit as it enters Idaho. There are actually two routes for the Oregon Trail, the main route and the Lander Cutoff. I think we were on the Lander Cutoff for awhile.

Our last stop in Wyoming was Kemmerer, where we learned that the J.C. Penney company got its start. The first store is still operating, and they call it the “Mother Store.” Which is kind of weird but interesting. J.C. Penney’s house is in an historic Penney District in the town. We also had some good Mexican food in town, unrelated to the Penney history.

The J.C. Penney Mother Store in Kemmerer, Wyoming

Still traveling on U.S. 30, we crossed the border into Idaho and stopped in the first town, Montpelier, to resupply (just like the emigrants). We were planning to stay at a U.S. Forest Service campground in Cache National Forest, so we needed to get some things that didn’t require refrigeration. We did buy some ice to keep the things in the refrigerator chilled, but mostly we got some canned food and fruit, plus some croissants, because croissants are always good to have.

From Montpelier, we took some state routes through Ovid and Liberty, then on to the entrance of the aptly named Emigrant Campground. Lots of pine trees, but only a few available campsites. We found a good one, quiet and with dappled shade (that moved around all over the place as the sun moved through the sky) and set up camp. The quiet continued until all the folks who were out kayaking and ATV’ing came back for dinner. Ah well. It was still a lovely location.

Our campsite at Emigrant Camp in southeast Idaho

We did move to a quieter campground, also lovely, and we tried out our solar panel for the first time. It worked great (it’s covered with a quilt in the photo because we weren't sure if it would stop charging the battery when it was full), and we could run the refrigerator and had lights in the evening even off the grid here. Of course, we were here on the summer solstice, so it was quite late before the sun’s light faded and we even needed electric lights. We stayed for two nights, and on Sunday morning we drove back into Montpelier for a delicious breakfast at a restaurant called Roosters Grazing.