OCTA-AHW at South Pass

AHW board members Barbara Dobos and Tom Rea spent the afternoon of Monday, June 14, at South Pass with stalwarts from the national Oregon-California Trails Association. The OCTA people were on hand to scout locations from which to shoot footage that will be used in promotional videos; Dobos and Rea talked at length with them about ways OCTA, the alliance, and other conservation and history-minded groups might collaborate in the coming months as the Bureau of Land Management revises its Resource Management Plan for the Lander, Wyoming Field Office. This BLM field office contains the most historic and scenic stretch of the Oregon-California-Mormon Trail anywhere. All agreed that the more people the agency hears from who value the trail, the better.

We drove to the top of Pacific Butte, which afforded spectacular views of the whole South Pass area, from Oregon Buttes to the top of the Wind Rivers, and from Pacific Springs as far east as Burnt Ranch.

Clockwise from top right: OCTA Director Travis Boley; Dobos; Elk on Pacific Butte; the Wind River Range; Rea; Salt Lake City historian and Oregon Trail scholar Will Bagley; and, at the monument Ezra Meeker erected at South Pass in 1906, national OCTA board member John Krizek, of Prescott, AZ.