Windlass Hill

In the prior post, I mentioned that there were two powerful "feeling of being there" experiences from today, the first being California Hill. The second of these is visiting Windlass Hill & Ash Hollow.

I do not have photos of either of these places, as I forgot to charge the battery in my camera the night before (duh) so it ran out just before I got there. I did get a photo off of the web, though, so I'm posting it here so you can see (though it's really hard to tell from the photo...it was VERY steep, and didn't look nearly as hard from the bottom as it did from the top). You can see the wagon ruts ("swales") on the hill.



Windlass Hill was the particularly notable part of this site. This hill was the steepest (they're not kidding) hill that the wagon trains encountered during the first half of their journey. Some described it as worse than vertical--it wasn't that bad, but it was pretty steep, and very hard to imagine wagons going down. Apparently, oxen broke legs, wagons broke wheels and axles, and emigrants broke limbs as well trying to control their vehicles and navigate the hill. Though they found it scary, they apparently were willing to take the risk for the shade, fresh water, and peaceful setting of Ash Hollow at the bottom.

Just FYI, the name "Windlass" Hill is not for a geographic feature, or, like many other places, named for a person or an event. A windlass is a sort of mechanical apparatus for lifting a heavy weight (or lowering it down a hill). It's used to raise and lower anchors or buckets into wells...it's a horizontal cylinder with a rope or chain wrapped around it and a crank to raise and lower something. From what we learned, it was assumed that the emigrants used a windlass to navigate this particular steep hill, but all the signs and historical documents say that there is no evidence that anyone actually did that, so it's a bit of a misnomer.

We hiked to the top of Windlass Hill along a VERY steep path (of course, the fact that it was 98 degrees outside didn't help), in order to get a sense of what it was like at the top, peering over the edge. And then we hiked straight down the hill on an alternative trail that was closer to following the route of the wagons.

Intense stuff, and heady to imagine--you could feel the fear there. All the way up, we said "this doesn't look that steep" (huff puff huff puff), and all the way down, we said "They took WAGONS and oxen down THIS???". The signs said some people took an entire extra day to g around. That would have been me.