Emigrant Experience Tour
This page describes a tour from 2009
“Emigrant Experience” Tour on the Applegate Trail
Across the Black Rock Desert and Through High Rock Canyon
Imagine it!
The year is 1849; the month, September. You are floating overhead in a hot air balloon, from north central Nevada, northwest almost to where the states of Nevada, California, and Oregon all come together, and then on southwest into California’s Central Valley.
If you were able to complete that flight in one day, you would see, below you, a continuous thin white line drawn across deserts and mountains — a line drawn by the canvas tops of thousands of covered wagons. If you descended low enough you could see more than ten thousand men, far fewer women, and a scattering of children. There would be a 425-mile-long line of covered wagons, men, women, children, mules, oxen, and horses, all heading for the promise of riches in the California gold fields.
Come back to the year 2009.
Almost half of the length of trail followed by the covered wagons described above now lie in the Black Rock Desert-High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area (NCA) designated by the U.S. Congress in the year 2000. Congress found that “The areas of northwestern Nevada known as the Black Rock Desert and High Rock Canyon contain and surround the last nationally significant, untouched segments of the historic California emigrant Trails, including wagon ruts, historic inscriptions, and a wilderness landscape largely unchanged since the days of the pioneers.” And that “The relative absence of development in the Black Rock Desert and High Rock Canyon areas from emigrant times to the present day offers a unique opportunity to capture the terrain, sights, and conditions of the overland trails as they were experienced by the emigrants and to make available to both present and future generations of Americans the opportunity of experiencing emigrant conditions in an unaltered setting.”
You are hereby offered that “opportunity of experiencing emigrant conditions in an unaltered setting.”
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Chuck Dodd, an authority on the Applegate-Lassen Trail that runs across the Black Rock Desert and through High Rock Canyon, author of California Trail (one of KC Publication’s Voyage of Discovery series) and Guide to Getting Around in the Black Rock Desert and High Rock Canyon, will lead an interpreted “Emigrant Experience” tour along the Applegate-Lassen Trail, in 2009. Please see the calendar for dates.
You are invited to join him.
The four-day, three-night tour will run from Imlay, Nevada to Goose Lake (lying across the California-Oregon border north of Alturas). Spectacular scenery. Camping on the trail. Mostly no gas, no water, no toilets, no trees. Everyone will be responsible for their own camping equipment, food, and water, and (if they want) for their own reservations at Soldier Meadows Ranch. Four wheel drive, high clearance vehicles required. Vehicles will be scratched (Nevada pin-striped) by sage brush in High Rock Canyon. Everyone should have gas enough for 200 miles, much of it in low gears over rocky terrain, some of it in four-wheel drive. (If we are lucky, we won’t travel the full 200 miles before we reach a gas pump, but we need a margin of safety.) The tour will be limited to 15 vehicles. No dogs, no campfires, no firearms, no trailers.
Sites visited during the tour will include Antelope Springs and the Susan Coon grave, Rabbithole Springs, Black Rock and Black Rock Springs, Double Hot Springs, Mud Meadows, the Lassen-Clapper murder site, Bruff’s “Descent into Fly Canyon,” High Rock Lake, High Rock Canyon (the “Post Office” cave, the “Jaquith” emigrant inscription, “The Narrows,” the Fox homestead at Yellow Rock Canyon, Israel Lord’s “Californian”), Upper High Rock Canyon, Bruff’s “Singular Rock,” Massacre Ranch, Painted Point, 49er Pass, Surprise Valley, Fandango Pass, and the descent to Goose Lake.
Chuck’s interpretation will be based on the diaries and journals of J. Goldsborough Bruff, captain of the 1849 “Washington City and California Mining Association” wagon train, Israel Shipman Pelton Lord, homeopathic doctor on the trail in 1849, and William Swain, Alonzo Delano and many others who left us a wealth of written records of their journeys along the trail. We will stop at the sites these overland emigrants described to read their descriptions, compare the landscape of today with the drawings they made in 1849, and cast our eyes about for the lost graves of the loved ones they left behind. We will sweat in the heat as they did and feel the night cold as they did and we will eat the dust as they did to capture their experience. But we will eat better than they did, we will ride instead of walk as they did , and the route will not be littered with the bones of dead mules and oxen as it was for them. The tour will be keyed to Chuck's new Guide to Traveling the Applegate-Lassen Trail. (Participants can purchase Chuck's guide for a special discount price of $20 plus applicable tax and shipping. See Chuck's web site, 19thcenturypublications.com for additional information.)
Each person on the tour will receive a copy of a different emigrant’s description of his journey, to be returned to Chuck at the end of the tour. Then, during the tour, each person will be asked to “represent” his or her emigrant by sharing the experiences of that emigrant with the other participants on the tour, by relating what the emigrant’s felt as he traveled through the area, by identifying things the emigrants described, by reading relevant parts of the description, and by asking questions prompted by the description.
Want to re-live the “emigrant experience” of the mid-nineteenth century? Want to see the spectacular Black Rock Desert and High Rock Canyon, essentially as it was when John Fremont first traveled through it 1843-44? Come join us on the “Emigrant Experience” Tour on the Applegate-Lassen Trail Across the Black Rock Desert and Through High Rock Canyon.
TOUR PARTICIPANTS MUST RSVP BY July 19, 2009!
Who? Contact: Matthew “Metric” Ebert (775) 557-2900 metric@blackrockdesert.org