I feel that we were obligated as parents to do a deep dive on the Oregon Trail if only based on the route we had chosen to take us westward. First stop was Scott’s Bluff National Monument. One of the beauties of road schooling is that we can determine in large part what education looks like and how we present it to the kids. We’ll often turn to the internet to find professionals that know how to educate about the subjects on which we want to focus. This particular morning began with a librarian reading a story to our kids through Youtube while they ate breakfast about what it may have been like for young children on the Oregon Trail. It was a great way to set the stage on what the Oregon trail was all about.
We were lucky enough to have stayed only about 20 minutes from the monument, so traveling there was incredibly easy. The Visitor Center was closed, but like most parks right now, we were able to get passport stamps and Jr Ranger supplies. There was a great audio tour along the Oregon Trail Path that led from the Visitor Center (and the kids loved the covered wagon replicas – the Original RVs, of course).
The drive up Summit Road is limited to vehicles under 25 feet, but added bonus of getting there when they open and COVID-travel-decline, the parking lot was empty and the Park Rangers were fine letting us unhitch the rig so we could drive to the top – YAY!
I had been to Scott’s Bluff before, but it was over 20 years ago, so the memories were a little bit hazy. What I did remember, though, was seeing the incredible wagon ruts carved into the stone. I was kind of shocked when we left the monument and never saw them. We took a quick pause in the parking lot so I could do some research. Turns out, my memories had smooshed a couple of places together. After consulting the maps, we re-routed our exit to go through Guernsey, Wyoming. It only added about an hour to the drive and it was so worth it.
In Guernsey, you can find the best representation of wagon ruts that are still around – over four feet deep in places! Talk about putting everything the kids had just learned into serious perspective…it was perfect. Just a little further down the road from the Wagon Ruts site, you can also find Register Cliff where travelers carved their names into the rock – sometimes to commemorate their dead, other times to commemorate the living that had made it thus far. Register Cliff has seen a lot of vandalism since I saw it some 20-odd years ago. New fencing has been put up to try and protect what is there. Even with all that, you can still see names carved in from the early 1800’s. We were the only ones there at both of these sites with one other vehicle showing up right as we left.
My kids are now a wealth of knowledge about the Oregon Trail. Brian got to see all of these places for the first time, and I got to dust off those obviously rusty memories. This is really what we had hoped for in this adventure – the chance to make this country and much of its history come alive.
