IN A RUT!

Serving a mission is never dull or boring, 

but now we can say that we have literally been . . .
"in a rut!"

Last week we took a little "missionary field trip" to see a few other important places that our pioneers would have passed along the Great Western Trail.

Several hours to the east of where we are serving, the Oregon/California/Mormon Trail passed through an area of very soft stone.  After years of travel over that rock, the 500,000 emigrants and their covered wagons and handcarts wore the rock down as much as 5 feet deep in places,

and those ruts are still visible today.

Sometimes the wagon and handcart wheels wore the stone down to look like just a deep road.

Elder Bushman brought his personal handcart with him on his mission 
and has taken it to every historic location he has visited.  
This was a perfect place to bring it and take a picture showing just how deep the ruts really are.

We're all smiles pulling the handcart through these ruts, 
but it would have been quite a challenge with a load in the back,
 plus they were pulling up the hill!

We took a group picture of all the winter missionaries:  

the Bushmans, the Martins, the Moenches, the Hutchinsons, the Cherries, and the Thomases.

 We're all in this rut together!

Look how deep some of those ruts are!

My feet are in a rut about 14" deep!

I couldn't resist the temptation to do a little handcart art in the dust on our back window!

We finally got "out of our rut" and headed east again to Fort Laramie,

a place of resupply for covered wagon trains as well as the handcarts companies.  

Unfortunately for the Willie and the Martin handcart companies, 

no one in Utah knew they were coming across the plains so late, 

and no supplies had been sent to Fort Laramie for them.

It was amazing to see this place in person, as it is huge!  It must have been a bustling outpost of civilization in those early days, full of soldiers and their horses, traders, stores and trading posts, as well as emigrants and their livestock just passing through.

We have told about it many times in our Visitors' Center.  

Note the rows of beds inside the barracks and the corn cob checkers game on the table.

Here we are standing on the long porch of the military barracks at Fort Laramie.

Out in the middle of the field at Fort Laramie there was an enormous tree all by itself.

We were intrigued with (and a little envious of) the futuristic "rover" that is visible between these two old restored buildings at  the fort.

After Fort Laramie we headed even further east to see Chimney Rock, an amazing rock formation, 

and one of the landmarks the pioneers encountered on the trail west.

This is a fascinating rock formation! 

It juts out high into the sky and you can see it for many miles before you get to it.  

Below on the upper left is a drawing that was made in a pioneer journal from the 1850's.  

You can see how different that looks from the current photograph in the middle.  

Lightning struck the top of Chimney Rock in the 1990's and broke off part of the tip. 

 On the right you can see how it looked in the 1930's (top) compared to a picture taken today (below.)  

A good portion of the tip is gone.

On the lower left side is the center panel of a quilt made using needle-turn applique. 

It is beautifully done! 

Visitors are no longer permitted to walk out to Chimney Rock because there are so many rattlesnakes in that area.  We saw "Beware of Rattlesnakes!" signs in numerous languages just in the area of the Visitors' Center.

Instead of walking out there, we settled for a picture pulling Elder Bushman's handcart.

The clerk in the Visitors' Center was really tickled when 12 Mormon missionaries came to visit and brought a real handcart!  He looks kind of like a pioneer himself with his long, white beard, 

and Elder Thomas lent him his hat so he could look the part even more for a picture.

Then he took multiple pictures of all of us.

This touching monument to "Wee Granny" was erected here by her ancestors in 2006.  Her name was Mary Murray Murdoch, and she was just 4' 7" tall and weighed about 90 pounds.  Her husband had died in Scotland trying to rescue a man from poisonous air in a mine shaft, but she still wanted to come to Zion and join her son John who was already there.  

At the age of 73 she joined the Martin Handcart Company and came by herself.  Near this spot her body gave out, and her last words were, "Tell John that I died with my face toward Zion."

She is just another one of countless amazing pioneer examples to each of us!

Traveling the Mormon Trail like this has added new dimension to our understanding of what all the pioneers experienced, especially our beloved Willie and Martin handcart pioneers.