Emigrant Springs State Park - Meacham, OR

On Monday, July 5th, we left Three Island Crossing State Park at Glenns Ferry, Idaho and went west to Boise. We needed a couple of “big city” days to take care of some things - LaVerne some new sunglasses at Lenscrafters, an oil change for the Jeep, laundry, Wal-Mart, etc.

Today, Wednesday, we left Boise, hit I-84 west and crossed into Oregon at 10:20 MDT, and then into the Pacific Time Zone at 10:08 PDT.

The Oregon Trail emigrants had been following the Snake River for over 300 miles, but now the Snake takes a turn north at a place that was designated as Farewell Bend. There is a state park and some Oregon Trail Interpretive information. As the name implies, this is the point where the Oregon Trail travelers left the Snake River and headed across the southeast corner of Oregon to connect with the Columbia River. We got off I-84 and checked out the park and the bend.

Here are two pictures - one from out on I-84 overlooking Farewell Bend, and then another from within the state park.





Up to Farewell Bend we had been traveling through a mix of farm land (huge fields of wheat, corn, potatoes, and alfalfa) and some treeless hills - sage desert landscape. After Farewell Bend we really got into the mountains. It was still the treeless, bare, sage desert type landscape, but it wound around in & out among the hills following small streams - at one point, a pretty good size river, the Grande Ronde.

Here’s a few pictures of some of today‘s scenery.









Then we started climbing up into the Blue Mountains and the landscape gradually changed from the treeless, sage desert to heavily evergreen (Douglas Fir) forested terrain on both sides of the interstate.

Here’s a couple more scenery pictures.





Needless to say, the whole landscape today from the bare, sage desert hills to the evergreen forests was just beautiful. We topped out at the summit of the Blue Mountains at 4193 feet elevation and in a few miles got to our destination for today - Emigrant Springs State Park near Meacham, OR.

This place was another major stopping spot for the Oregon Trail emigrants. They had been traveling many miles away from the Snake River and across a lot of barren landscape. As the name implies, there are springs here and the emigrants took advantage to camp and re-fill their water supply before making the final run to the Columbia River.