City of Rocks

From Fort Hall, the emigrants headed west along the Snake River until they reached the Raft River. There, they bid farewell to their friends heading for Oregon and continued southwest towards City of Rocks, a route which had probably first been taken by Joseph Walker in 1843. The Salt Lake Trail to City of Rocks came into being in 1848 when a party led by Samuel Hensley got caught in a violent summer storm as they headed west on Hastings Cutoff. The group retreated to Salt Lake and then decided to head north, hoping to pick up the more established trail west.

They joined up with the Fort Hall-Raft River approach at the southern end of City of Rocks, near the rock formation known today as "Twin Sisters." Later that year, the Mormon Battalion, returning to Salt Lake from California, met up with Hensley and they also followed his new Salt Lake Trail. The next year, 1849, a wagon train headed by Benoni Hudspeth opened a new shortcut from Soda Springs that bypassed Fort Hall and connected with the old Fort Hall road near the confluence of Cassia Creek and the Raft River.

From there, the Hudspeth Cutoff continued along the old Fort Hall - Raft River Route to the City of Rocks. In the years following 1849, most California emigrants would follow the Hudspeth Cutoff, bypassing old Fort Hall.

As the emigrants left the City of Rocks, they had to cross over Granite Pass. Yet, few made much mention of this pass. In fact, the emigrants themselves could not settle on a name for this pass. Many of them did not give it a name at all in their accounts. Perhaps the pass had little impact, coming as it did in the midst of the day-to-day weariness that the trail had, by now, assumed. Or perhaps the glories of the just-passed City of Rocks simply overwhelmed it.

Leander Loomis, July 7, 1850:

To wander among these vast ledge of rock, to crall in the great caves, caverns, and holes, which nature had formed in these rocks fills the mind of man, with a wild romantic Grandeur, which raises him above his natural sphere, and leads him, to aspire, to reach the angles [angels'] seat. --And a gain to wander up and down along the paths which nature had formed in some places leaving walls on either side some 300 feet high, almost perpendicular, causes man to Gase with astonishment, and wonder, at natures doings....

Joseph Middleton, Aug 26, 1849:

On passing through and out of this amphitheatre to the S.W. you see Domes, Tureets, Monuments, Urns on elevated Pyramids, broken Columns, and an enormous Idol; insulated in the west end of the amphitheatre as if it were the presiding Deity of the Spring which runs near him. And Walls -- all in ruins in a highly dilapidated state of dimensions, -- of extraordinary variety and astonishing grandeur. And a fine enormous Grotto. In advancing up through the gorge, the insulated blocks of stone rise up before you in succession, spearing up into the air in Pyramids of all kinds of deformity in an astonishing manner of sublime desolation.