Saturday Adventure

We had quite the adventure on Saturday. It seemed like it had been forever since Kevin had a Saturday off of work and the weather was fantastic. We decided to take a trip in our new Jeep. I have a book that lists at least 100 trails in Utah to take, so we looked through the book and found one that wouldn't be too far away and was open year-round. It was a 130 mile portion of the old Pony Express Trail. 110 miles were dirt road.

Here are the kiddos all ready to go on our adventure.

We started in Fairfield Utah. This is an old inn along the trail. There used to be an army base here back around the time of the Civil War. This hotel is pretty much all that is left.

This is the museum for Camp Floyd...it wasn't quite as exciting as I hoped, but getting to see the hotel was well worth the admission.

We assumed this was the kitchen, though they didn't have any kitchen appliances in it. You can see through the door into the dining room.

There were 4 guest rooms...this is just one of them. The stairs to get up to them were the scariest stairs I've ever been on.

This is the rec room where everyone would gather at night. But drinking and gambling were not allowed.

All along the trail were these markers. They marked where each stop for the riders used to be. Each one is about 10-15 miles apart. The distance a horse could run at full speed for. They would switch horses at each one of these stops. Mail could get from Sacramento CA to St. Joseph MO in 10 days.

There was only one building actually still standing along the way. It is a reconstruction of the original. Here is the inside.

And this is what it looks like on the outside. Owen would have been in the picture, but he was sleeping in the car and we didn't want to wake him up.

We had to drive through about 4 different mountain ranges along the path. I thought this one was very pretty.

We found this along the way...off the path a bit. It is an old storage shed. Just a few hundred feet away was an entrance to what looked like an old mine. That was completely sealed shut though.

After leaving Fairfield at the beginning of our trail there was one city along the way called Callao (130 miles) They did have a school and about 6 houses that we saw. 3 of the 6 were still the old wood cabins that had been updated slightly. We were going to take pictures, but I felt silly because the people were standing outside of them. It was very strange to see.

At the end of the trail is Gold Hill Utah. This is their General Store. There were a few houses that looked like people lived in them, but otherwise it is a ghost town. These people live in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town is Wendover at 45 miles away on dirt roads.

We didn't use a great map so we assumed there would be a nice highway to take us up to Wendover and we could cruise home on the freeway, but that wasn't the case. Luckily we had our GPS which told us the quickest way home, which included another 100 miles of dirt road. We left our house at 10 am and returned at 9pm. It was a great day though and everyone had fun. :)