A Rocky Path for Pilgrims

The column of young Mormon pilgrims stretched for nearly a mile as the sun set over the glacial peaks of Wyoming’s Wind River mountain range.

Teenagers clad in 19th-century pioneer outfits strained mightily to pull unwieldy wooden handcarts over rocky terrain while keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes. Nervous broods of sage grouse scattered as the first trekkers approached. Poised on nearby ridgelines, pronghorn antelope kept a wary vigil.

Near this same place in 1856, more than 200 half-starved Mormon converts from Europe -- pushing and pulling handcarts because the cash-strapped church could not afford covered wagons and oxen -- died in a fierce autumn blizzard as they attempted to reach Salt Lake City, the Mormon Zion.

Once viewed as a dark chapter in Mormon history, handcart treks have become a booming spiritual enterprise, reenacted not only here on the original route but also in Mormon communities as distant as Cambodia and Sierra Leone.

What the exodus from Egypt is to Jews and the hegira from Mecca is to Muslims, the handcart trek is rapidly becoming for 12 million Mormons.

The heart of the trail reenactment is Rocky Ridge, a steep pass several hundred feet above the Sweetwater River here, where more than a dozen of the 1856 party died of exhaustion and exposure to freezing temperatures.

Guiding more than 300 weary teenagers and 22 handcarts over the trail on a late summer afternoon was Utah investment banker Erik Ekberg, 34, a church counselor.

“We’ve had a lot of blisters. Climbing Rocky Ridge was really tough,” Ekberg said. “This is the place where I think these kids get a good idea of what their ancestors endured.”

Taking a break by the side of the trail, some trekkers sipped water in silence while others stretched out, eyes closed, on the shady ground under the handcarts.

“It’s ironic that the most costly and fatal disaster in Mormon history is now reenacted this way,” said Salt Lake historian Will Bagley. “But the church sees it as a celebration of suffering, endurance and eventual triumph. It really is a story of incredible sacrifice.”

This summer, about 12,000 people have made the 26-mile overland trek along the Sweetwater River on the northern edge of Wyoming’s Red Desert to South Pass, where 19th-century travelers crossed the Continental Divide.

Followed by church elders in their SUVs, fed barbecued chicken and fruit cobbler prepared by cooks in Dutch ovens, entertained in camp by harmonica and fiddle players, today’s trekkers walk a fraction of the trail and can only imagine what the original journey was like.

The route across these mostly treeless high plains once dubbed the “Great American Desert” has become so heavily traveled of late that the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages the trail and its environs, fears it’s being overrun.

Concerns About Trails

Some environmentalists contend that one of the country’s most isolated and forbidding territories, set amid towering mountains and table-top red buttes 7,500 feet above sea level, will never be the same again.

“This is a big production by the world’s fastest-growing religion,” said Barbara Dobos of Casper, Wyo., who led an effort to block a church purchase of public land at nearby Martin’s Cove, which Mormons consider hallowed ground. “The trail is not an exclusive Mormon experience. More than 500,000 other western immigrants followed the same path. I understand where the church is coming from, but I hate to see others intimidated or crowded out.”

Every summer between June and September, fleets of Mormon buses raise billowing clouds of dust in an area where it was once rare to see any traffic. One frequent visitor recalled seeing 14 buses parked at the Rock Creek campground where moose graze in the creek bed. Sweeping panoramas long devoid of any sign of human settlement are now punctuated by rows of portable latrines put up to service the trekkers.

Church officials have tried to appease local residents by taking different routes with the buses and paying the county to water down the roads. The church also notifies the Nature Conservancy, which owns a three-mile stretch along the Sweetwater River, when large groups of trekkers are on the way, so the nonprofit conservation organization can warn unsuspecting trout fishermen.

But resistance still simmers in tough former mining towns like Atlantic City and Jeffrey City.

“The Mormons race through town, stir up dirt and run over our little critters,” said Joan Eiseman, a rancher who sometimes tends bar at the Mercantile, an Atlantic City saloon and restaurant. No one is expecting the alcohol-free Mormons to belly up to the bar, but Eiseman and others engaged in nearby businesses might feel differently if the self-contained Mormon delegations contributed more to local trade.

Angered by the infusion of Mormon pilgrims, one Atlantic City local put up a sign on his woodpile, declaring it to be the “Utah State Line.”

Federal officials contend the growing number of handcart trekkers -- up from fewer than 1,000 a decade ago -- has taken a heavy toll on the historic corridor where the Oregon, California, Pony Express and Mormon trails converge.

“The demand on the trail already exceeds its carrying capacity,” said BLM outdoor recreation planner Ray Hanson in his Lander, Wyo., office. “Not everyone who wants to make a handcart trek can do it on the original trail, nor can the trail handle it.”

Hanson said that in some places, tracks of the original pioneers have been obliterated. New ruts, caused when bigger groups drive around mudholes, scar the terrain and disturb the sagebrush habitat.

The annual count of trekkers is more than four times the 2,962 Mormon converts who made the original journey in 10 “companies” during the years 1856-60.

Hanson recalled watching a group of 400 trekkers on Rocky Ridge as a truck crested the hill pulling a utility trailer filled with sound equipment. Rocky Ridge is a combination of bare rock and deep wagon ruts carved into the red soil and sagebrush.

The driver explained that church leaders wanted to play a crescendo of inspirational music as the young pilgrims reached the top of the hill.

After completing an environmental assessment, federal land agents recently proposed a permit and fine system that would restrict the flow of pilgrims to 7,500 a year, limit the size of individual parties and ban accompanying vehicles on some sections of the trail. If approved, the plan would take effect by next summer. Mormon trekkers would be charged $4 a head to make the trip.

Threat of Closure

If those steps fail to control the traffic, Hanson said, the BLM may consider closing some sections of the trail to all visitors.

Church elders scoff at the suggestion that the Mormon leadership has the power to limit or control church members who are inspired to make the trek. The only thing the church can control is the number of handcarts it distributes free to trekkers, said Bryce Christensen, director of the Mormon Handcart Historic Sites in Wyoming. Reservations for the 300 church-supplied handcarts, similar to the original design except with more durable wheels and axles, have been made through 2007.

But there is nothing to prevent individual congregations from making their own handcarts and hitting the trail on their own, without making reservations through the church. An estimated 3,000 traveled the trail on their own this summer.

“The church doesn’t operate as a big monolithic group where everybody marches in cadence to Mao Tse-tung,” Christensen said.

Christensen, 72, a retired senior FBI agent in Los Angeles who heads a group of Mormon missionary couples who staff trail outposts, contends that some of the moves proposed by federal officials smack of the anti-Mormon prejudice that has dogged the church since its early days in New York, Missouri and Illinois. In 1844, Joseph Smith, prophet-founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was assassinated by a mob in Carthage, Ill.

“They give the impression that if you are a Presbyterian from Omaha, you are welcome, but if you are a Mormon, then tough luck,” he said.

Lloyd Larson, 47, an oil field construction contractor and president of the Riverton, Wyo., Mormon congregation, said he was bewildered by a proposed BLM plan that would ban church vehicle traffic over Rocky Ridge but not place a similar ban on other groups.

“If they are really concerned about traffic over Rocky Ridge, they should close it to everyone,” Larson said.

The Bureau of Land Management estimates that in addition to the Mormon handcart trekkers, at least 2,000 other people -- including fishermen, hunters, mountain bikers and equestrians -- pass over the same trail. The trail also attracts a number of history buffs interested in following the Oregon, California and Pony Express routes.

The traffic jam on the Mormon Trail presents an unusual spectacle in a country not known for holy places or pilgrimage routes teeming with devotees.

On any given summer day, said Christensen, as many as 48 buses fill the parking lot at Martin’s Cove, a sprawling Sweetwater River ranch that is the largest of the handcart stations owned by the church. It was at Martin’s Cove, which the church leases from the BLM, where one of the snowbound handcart groups camped for five days in 1856 and where many people perished.

Besides the 12,000 trekkers who travel the 26-mile trail segment to South Pass, another 40,000 pull handcarts for just five miles at Martin’s Cove. The church operates another handcart station near Evanston, Wyo., as well as several in Utah.

Before heading out, handcart group leaders are given instructions at Martin’s Cove on how to make pioneer bonnets and Dutch oven cobbler. Way station restrooms are spotless. Water is delivered on flatbed trucks in large plastic “water buffaloes” identical to those used by advancing armies.

Logistically, at least, it is a far cry from the original handcart treks, which began as an economy measure under Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young.

With the threat of war looming with the United States, Young was intent on bringing eager European converts as quickly as possible to the Salt Lake City settlement, which he intended to build into a separate Mormon nation, Deseret.

Church resources were drawn down because of drought and grasshopper plagues. Young figured that by reducing the number of wagons and asking the immigrants to pull their own gear in wooden carts, the church’s emigration fund could save thousands of dollars.

But the plan backfired in 1856 as two of the handcart groups, the 500-member Willie Company and the 576-member Martin Company, were caught in a fall blizzard, killing 200 people and forcing a desperate rescue attempt from Salt Lake City.

Symbol of Sacrifice

For years after that, said church historian Bagley, the handcart disaster was considered a dark spot in Mormon history. “It was the largest loss of life on the Oregon-California trail,” he said. “For many years, no one dared talk about it.”

But after the church celebrated its 150th year in Salt Lake City in 1997, the handcart treks began to be viewed as a symbol of sacrifice and courage. Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, visiting Martin’s Cove that year, told a crowd of 10,000 Mormons that they were “walking on hallowed ground.”

Since then, this stretch of desert has come to figure prominently in the church’s evolving story of flight from persecution and triumph over adversity.

Church education committees began to regard the trek, along with visits to the grave sites of fallen pioneers, as a way of connecting Mormon youths with their pioneer past. Handcart pageants, staged like passion plays, began to be performed around the world.

“This is an awesome trip for our youth,” explained Cord Pack, 38, a Mormon bishop in Eden, Utah, and a veteran of 12 treks down the Sweetwater trail. “We are not trying to re-create the physical struggle. This is about our spiritual history. We are walking in the footsteps of our ancestors, but we eat incredibly.”

Rashers of bacon sizzled on kettle grills as Pack led his group of 82 in a song dating to the handcart era.

“Though hard to you this journey may appear,” the Mormons sang, “grace shall be as your day. ‘Tis better far for us to strive, our useless cares from us to drive.”