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Mormon Pioneer Trail

Recently I got a book called Sixty Hikes Within Sixty Miles by Greg Witt. It's for the Salt Lake City area.  For Labor Day we decided to hike one of the hikes in the book called "Mormon Pioneer Trail".


It took us about an hour to drive there.  The trailhead is near Park City.  This is a very historic trail.  The Donner Party blazed the trail first in 1846.  It took them more than a week to get through this 9-mile section and it really slowed them down, costing them valuable time which led to their being trapped in the Sierras for the winter.  But it really helped out the Mormon pioneers the next year when they used the trail to get into the Salt Lake Valley.  That helped them get into the valley sooner which allowed them to plant crops before the end of July.  The trail was also used in 1860 and 1861 by the Pony Express.


Back to 2015.   We drove to the Mormon Flat trailhead and hiked nearly 5 miles to Big Mountain Pass.  It's uphill the whole way, gaining about 1400 feet in elevation.  The last portion is especially steep and wasn't that popular with my children who were wondering when this hike was ever going to end!  This is also a mountain biking trail and I think my older children would have enjoyed doing that a little more.  Starting from Big Mountain Pass and going down to Mormon Flat would have been easier for sure.


Because this is a one-way hike, we had planned to have my husband run back to the car at Mormon Flat and drive to Big Mountain Pass to pick us up.  However, our youngest was really not wanting to hike and since she can be incredibly slow, my husband decided to go back to the car after hiking for about 20 minutes and drive with Camille to the other end of the hike.  He then planned to start hiking down the trail from the other direction and meet us partway.  Part of that plan worked...  We didn't realize that there are no less than three trails coming off from Big Mountain Pass and Scott picked the wrong one to walk down.  He didn't go far fortunately.

You can't see it well but there's a large carcass of some animal lying in the middle of the picture.  Maybe an elk died here?
So my group (three kids and I) arrived at Big Mountain Pass and saw our van but no Scott.  And the cell phone coverage wasn't very good.  So we decided to just wait for him there and eventually he showed up with Camille.  So it all worked out.



This is the view from Big Mountain Pass.
I really enjoyed thinking about the pioneers making their way up this mountain at the very end of their journey.  The author says this portion of their journey from Nauvoo was the steepest and longest sustained ascent and the highest elevation of the whole journey.  Certainly it would have been a very challenging trail for those pioneer wagons.  Walking the trail just increased my respect for them all the more.



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