It was also argued that emigrants would be glad to take this new road as all the pasture along the other road was "eaten off." Over this historic road we are now about to ride.
As we look up it is a forbidding prospect. Only brave men and sanguine would ever have dared to contemplate such a plan. The mountain cliffs, separated and split, arise before us as impassable barriers. Yet one branch of the old trail used to pass through the divide to the right, over to Hopkins Springs, while the one that was converted into the wagon road took the left-hand canyon to the main divide.
We now begin to ascend this road at the head of Squaw Valley, and in five minutes, or less, are able to decide _why_ it was never a success. The grade is frightful, and for an hour or more we go slowly up it, stopping every few yards to give our horses breath. All the way along we can trace the blazes on the trees made over sixty years ago. It is hard enough for horses to go up this grade, but to pull heavily-ladened wagons--it seems impossible that even those giant-hearted men, used to seeing so many impossible things accomplished, could ever have believed that such a road could be feasible. What wonderful, marvelous, undaunted characters they must have been, men with wills of inflexible steel, to overcome such obstacles and dare such hardships. Yet there were compensations. Squaw Creek's clear, pellucid, snow-fed stream runs purling, babbling or roaring and foaming by to the right. These pioneers with their women and children had crossed the sandy, alkali and waterless deserts. For days and weeks they had not had water enough to keep their faces clean, to wash the sand from their eyes. Now, though they had come to a land of apparently unscalable mountains and impassable rock-barriers, they had grass for the stock, and water,--delicious, fresh, pure, refreshing water for themselves. I can imagine that when they reached here they felt it was a new paradise, and that God was especially smiling upon them, and to such men, with such feelings, what could daunt, what prevent, what long stay their onward march.
As we ascend, the mountains on our right assume the form of artificial parapets of almost white rock, outlined against the bluest of blue skies. There is one gray peak ahead, tinged with green. The trail is all washed away and our horses stumble and slide, slip and almost fall over the barren and rough rocks, and the scattered bowlders, a devastating cloud-burst could not wash away.