As you already know, Kelley and I were invited to attend the Pioneer Trek and serve as part of the team that would document the Trek through video and still photographs. After taking over 1200 pictures myself, I wanted to create a blog post where I highlighted my favorite photos of the Trek adventure. I hope you enjoy these pictures because I certainly enjoyed taking them.
Three awesome Pioneer women...including me lovely wife. Kelley, wearing the Pioneer sunglasses and time-period hat. When I look at this picture I think that after watching Kelley battle cancer this past year, she would have been one of those Pioneer women that would have picked up a handcart and pulled it by herself all the way to the Salt Lake Valley.
The saying on this handcart banner made me laugh :)
Deer that the handcarts walked past and probably didn't even notice.
Notice the winding road at the bottom of this valley. This road started a 3 1/2 mile climb for the handcart families to the top of a hill just below where I took this picture.
This picture provides a great view of the mountainous terrain that the handcart families walked through.
Even in the midst of hardship, beauty can be found if one just takes a moment to pause and notice (what a great life lesson)
Sunset the first night.
The handcart camp.
While quietly waiting at the top of a hill for an approaching handcart family to arrive, this enormous and beautiful butterfly flew right past my face and landed on a flower near me. I cannot believe that it let me get this close for these pictures.
I am sure that many of the Pioneer families walked hand-in-hand like this husband and wife.
What a magnificent hillside backdrop as these handcart families make their way through this sagebrush filled valley. I imagine many scenes like this as the Pioneers made their way through southern Wyoming on their way to the Salt Lake Valley.
Captain Allen rests after roll playing the scene where the US Army took over 500 men from a traveling Pioneer wagon train and enlisted them into the Army to fight in the Mexican War. After these men left their families to serve in the Army, the women and children finished the 1000-mile journey to the Salt Lake Valley.
The 500 men, often called the Mormon Battalion, re-enact building walls in the settlement of modern-day San Diego.
Stake President, Wayne Tew, and his counselor, Ken Wagner, watch the handcart companies of women only pull the handcarts.
One of the stake Young women's leader literally picked up rocks off of the trail so that the handcarts families would have an easier time going down this steep hill......how many of us pick up and remove the "rocks of life" for those we love and serve so that their difficult pathways can be a little easier?
The Young Women of the stake re-enact pulling the handcarts to the Salt Lake Valley without the men who were serving in the Army. These girls pulled the handcarts up a very steep and rocky hill. As you can tell from the next few pictures, their strategy was to put as many girls on one handcart as possible and push it up the hill. As soon as the handcarts reached the top of the hill, the exhausted girls would then run down the hill, get another handcart, and start all over pushing it uphill.
Below is my favorite picture of the entire Trek. Look carefully....this is a perfect example of Christ-Like service and behavior.
On the last night of the Trek, all of the Youth and adult leaders on the Trek met in the middle of the meadow where camp was and participated in various dances from the Pioneer time period. Can you imagine approximately 300-350 teenage youth and their adult leaders on a Friday night dressed in Pioneer clothes, with no electronics and comforts of home, dancing the Virginian Reel in the dirt of a cow pasture? What was really amazing was the fact that everybody was laughing and smiling....the youth did not want to stop dancing. This truly was one of my favorite moments of the Trek.
