Mile 970: Permission to Cross
According to the Pony Express Bikepacking Route map on ridewithgps.com, the Route enters private property just past Independence Rock: "Must apply for access to the Dumbbell Ranch. Email Matt Hoobler:…
Mile 969: Independence Rock
"Like the emigrants, we approached the rock from the east side—a lusty monolith, a mile in circumference, and seemingly one solid piece of gray granite. No wonder that this tremulous…
Mile 969: Sweetwater River
"It was four miles and more from the end of the alkali stretch to the Sweetwater River—a beautiful mountain stream, swift, clear and full, which received its name from the…
Mile 957: Greasewood Creek
"Greasewood Creek was a welcome sight, a rapid ten-foot stream, midway of the twenty-mile stretch, where the oxen sunk their muzzles deep and drank as they crossed. After a slow…
Mile 947: Prospect Hill
"Another mile [from Willow Springs] brought the emigrants to the summit of Prospect ill. Often they had spent the night near Willow Springs and climbed the hill in the early…
Mile 946: Willow Springs
"In time [the emigrants] passed. out of the poison-spring region, went over a snappy ridge, and came to Willow Springs at a distance of twenty-six miles from the ferry. In…
Mile 937: Rock Avenue
"We left Poison Spider about the middle of the morning, heading for the next landmark, Rock Avenue. It proved satisfyingly true to its advanced advertising—a hideous stretch of deformed rock…
Mile 927-946: Emigrant Gap to Willow Station
"By either the Emigrant Gap route or the older road it was in the neighborhood of fifty miles from the ferry to Independence Rock on the Sweetwater River—a forced march…
Mile 927: Emigrant Gap, WY
"Our road started uphill and rose higher and higher, but very gently. Wyoming makes less fuss about its elevation than any place I know. To our left was the wide…
Mile 917: Fort Caspar
"Considered historically, the year 1858 is the beginning of the end of the picturesque extravaganza at the [North Platte] river crossing. First a prosaic military encampment, known as Mormon Ferry…
Wagons Across the North Platte
"There were those [at the North Platte Crossing], as at any ferry, who could not or would not pay the price and who used self-constructed substitutes. To these novices the…
‘Tis Better Thus
"Perhaps, as the lady journalists of the fifties would have phrased it, 'Tis better thus.' If the hundreds of persons who kept trail diaries could have an inkling of the…
Monthly Mail Wagon to Fort Laramie
"The monthly mail wagon to Fort Laramie also interested the home-hungry travelers. The mail wagon itself—slow, solitary, and defenseless—was gradually replaced by fast Abbot, Downing stagecoaches, convoyed in later years…
Mormon Ferry on the North Platte
"In 1847 the well organized Mormon migration faced the river. They built light pine-pole rafts capable of carrying an empty wagon, and went, hammer and tongs, at the task of…
Mile 917: Upper of Mormon Ferry
"Twenty-eight miles from /Deer Creek was the Upper or Mormon Ferry on the North Platte, near modern Casper. The eaarliest travelers found it, of course, in a state of nature…