12/27/08

There is always something eerie about walking along the Oregon Trail. Aside from the sheer emptiness of much of the land that encompasses the trail (Wyoming is an awfully lonely place), you can't help but think about the masses of people that trudged, and died, along the trail. In places, there are graves still visible, victims of adventure or of the movable forces that are poverty and hope. Sometime its just a thin line of parallel ruts that dances in and out amongst the heavy grasses and dust and cows, pathways that whither into the dusty blue of the far-off horizon. Lines that seem to touch the sky and disappear up into it. Outside of Casper, WY , the trails takes a more rugged and tangible form, where the continuous droll of wagons won the war against miles of sheer rock, where history is dredged right into stone. You can help but step into a trail and walk along and wonder about all the other people who have done just that while making their way cross country in a possibly life-ending journey to possibly nowhere.

Looking down a single rut that rips through the rock on the Oregon Trail

Me, actually standing IN the Oregon Trail

This is an example of the some of the ruts that cut straight through the rock... I wasn't expecting anything like this, after all the faint trails through grasslands I've seen

Jonmikel, reveling in his history

Another site we stopped by was Register Cliffs (all you Oregon Trail fans should remember this one) where people traveling to Oregon or California stopped and carved their names into the rock as a memoir to their adventures. The earliest name and date are in French from 1826 on Bastille Day, as the area was first popular with French trappers instead of American nomads. What's really cool about it, is while the truly historical names are fenced off and protected, there are still places where people can write their names on the rock. While I know conservationists and other liberal types may cringe at this, I think its brilliant. The site is dedicated to providing a record of people who pass by, so why shouldn't modern travelers be accorded the same courtesy? Otherwise people 200 years down the road will think that people just stopped coming, which they didn't if you check out all the 2008 records. Its' cheating history.

Some dates on Register Cliffs... we didn't leave our names, though I certainly thought about it