Oregon Trail- Sunday, July 9, 2017

     After breakfast at our hotel in Pocatello, Idaho, we got on the road, heading west to Oregon.  We had about a five hour drive in front of us.  We saw potato fields being watered near Pocatello, but as we got further west, the unwatered land turned brown and sage brush covered.  As we noted yesterday, this part of Idaho is very flat.  There are often mountain visible in the distance, but we were in very flat land here.  We finally stopped for lunch around 2:00 at an A&W, still in Idaho, but near the Oregon border.  We got to see an interesting cross-set of people from rural Idaho there, including one guy that was actually wearing spurs.  We crossed to Oregon and stopped for the family selfie outside the welcome center there.  Then, we kinda cheated and did a big u-turn, got back on the expressway heading east and went back into Idaho.  We took a family selfie at the Idaho welcome center because we hadn't gotten one yesterday.  Then we looped around and headed west once more.   About 3:19 Mountain time we passed into the Pacific time zone, turned our clock in our car back, and then were at 2:19 again.  The thermometer on the dashboard was hitting triple digits for the second day in a row.  The highest we noticed was 103.

      Part of the inspiration for this trip came when Emma said she had been studying the Oregon Trail in school and would like to visit it someday.  We picked the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center as one of the stops we had planned.  (When we reminded her that she said that, she said, "That was three years ago!")  As we drove west from Pocatello, we were basically following the Snake River, and paralleling the Oregon Trail.   We saw quite a few signs to Oregon Trail sights, but we had a lot of driving to do and stuck to the highway.  Our goal was to get to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Baker City, Oregon, and we'd get the story there.  Once we got there, we recognized the names of many of the places that we had passed.  Fort Hall was around the Pocatello area where we stayed.  Massacre Rocks was the location of an Indian attack (although these types of attacks were actually rare along the trail). "City of Rocks" was a landmark of rock formations that the emigrants noted as they passed.  Three Island Crossing was a way to get the wagons across the wide Snake River, by fording from island to island like three large stepping stones.  Fort Boise was an outpost of the British Hudson Bay Company, which helped establish a competing claim by the British for Oregon country.

     We were passing through the Plateau Area, which Scott has covered a lot in his Native American unit.  He has often told his students how the Natives of this area had to adapt to living along the rivers because the rest of the land was dry and harsh.  Just past Baker City, we could see what we assumed was the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center perched high on a hill, and as we were driving towards it, we stopped for Scott to get his picture taken at a large stone obelisk marking the nearby trail.   A sign that we read at the Interpretive Center explained

Between the Snake and the Blues-

150 years ago, the Flagstaff Hill area (nameless then) had the same dry, brown terrain, the same sparse vegetation, the same rugged basalt outcrops you see today.  Imagine yourself an emigrant.  After months of travel, you reach this rocky expanse of ankle-turning, wagon-eating ground.  Hot, dust winds smother your few remaining supplies.  This unforgiving terrain proves that rough times never end on the long Oregon Trail.

 Ahead of the travelers lay the part of the Rockies called the Blue Mountains, which did indeed look bluish in the haze today.  They would still have to cross them to make it to the fertile river valleys of Oregon that were that were their destination.

     The Oregon Trail Interpretive Center is a great little museum and tells its story well.  For some bureaucratic reason, this museum is run by the Department of the Interior, but it is not in the National Park Service.  It is run instead by the Bureau of Land Management.   That means it's not covered in any of the NPS materials and advertising, and that's a shame because it's a gem.  We started at the introductory movie, which is a little long and a little dated, but does a thorough job of introducing the story of the great migration on the trails.  Then, vignettes from the trail are represented a life-sized diorama of a portion of a wagon train that you walk through and between.  The path brings you two large sets of windows that overlook the valley below.  Ruts left by the original wagon trains can be seen crossing the valley, and the perspective from the interpretive center on top of this hill is quite dramatic.  We looked back towards the stone monument we had stopped at on the way up and could now clearly see the trail itself just a short distance from where we had stopped.   The story in the museum continues, as the museum examines the decision that people made to move and the question of what to bring with them.  Julie and Emma spent a while at a creatively designed exhibit that has you decide what to bring and load it into a wagon.  Proportionately sized blocks represent the space needed for a bed, for a barrel of bacon, and for any number of other things that you might want to take, but there is only a limited amount of space in a wagon, and cuts have to be made.  The story of the trip on the trail itself continues through the winding exhibit.  After a trip to gift shop, Scott and Julie took a moment at the "circled wagons" outside.  In the heat of the day, with the camp overlooking the actual trail, standing among the full-sized replica wagons, it was a very moving moment. 

     Scott and Julie did notice one quote from a pioneer that was used in the movie and again in the exhibit.  In 1853, Agnes Stewart Warner had written, "I am very weary of this journey, weary of myself and all around me, I long for the quiet of home where I can be at peace once more."  We laughed, because we thought that we had heard the words of this teenage girl somewhere before on this trip.  Maybe Agnes was upset because she was away from her dog and boyfriend and wasn't getting cell phone service or Wi-Fi. 

     We found a place for dinner in Baker City called the Sumpter Junction Restaurant.   It had a train motif in its decoration, with a large scale model train running through a model of a mountain railway.  We liked the food and the prices.

     The next step of the trip today has its roots on one of the nights when Julie and Scott were planning and making reservations.  When we were looking for a place to stay near Baker City, Julie came across a place called, "Eagle Cap Chalets."  She loved the description of the place and wanted to make a reservation here.  Scott noted that it would mean an extra two-hours of driving, but Julie was excited about it, and so we tried it.   It turns out that these two hours of driving were some through some of the prettiest country we've seen since Yellowstone.  We went through Wallowa County, Oregon towards the Hells Canyon area.  We were back among snow capped mountains, and wound on a road that followed alongside the beautiful Wallowa River, which made Julie and the girls wish they could raft in it.  There were lots of deer along the road, including one doe that was nursing her fawn.  We passed through a number of cute little towns, most notably Joseph, Oregon, which we may spend some time in tomorrow.   The road finally took us past the picturesque Wallowa Lake to an area filled with cabins and lodges.  Our "chalet" is charming on the outside, and is a series of large log buildings that seem perfect for an Oregon setting.  The room itself isn't that special-- kind of a standard hotel room, with a TV (and Wi-Fi), but the trip here was much better than anticipated.