Drivers on the popular Highway 26 around Mount Hood may not know that in the mid 1800s, this route was part of the Barlow Road, the final stretch of the Oregon Trail. The Barlow Road was in turn built from a trail made and used by Native Americans.
While much of the old Barlow Road is paved over, you can still walk some sections of the original wagon road. In today’s video, we’ll share how to walk a short section of the Barlow Road that leads to a pioneer woman’s grave.
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The Pioneer Woman’s Grave trail is about an hour and 15 minutes’ drive east of Portland.
You’ll find a small parking lot with a restroom. The Pacific Crest Trail also goes through here, so look out for the sign marking the Oregon Trail historic route.
This is a very short, 2.2-mile hike, but there are a lot of fallen trees, so heads-up that the footing can be a little tricky.
If you played the Oregon Trail computer game as a kid, you may remember the final stretch of the trail (from the Dalles to Oregon City) involved rafting down the Columbia River from the Dalles, not taking the Barlow Road around Mount Hood.
That’s because the river route was indeed the only option until 1846. The Dalles would get crowded with pioneers waiting for expensive and limited assistance traveling down the river, so in 1845 a group of pioneers led by Sam Barlow instead explored a Native American trail around Mount Hood as an alternative route.
This route was soon widened to become the Barlow Road, a toll road that was still difficult and dangerous for wagon trains to navigate, but that provided a second option for pioneers to complete the Oregon Trail.
The trail is a bit overgrown in places.
It soon reaches a pile of stones next to a forest road, which marks the pioneer woman’s grave. The stones were laid by a highway construction team, who found the grave of a pioneer woman who died here, right at the end of the Oregon Trail.
More on the hike: www.oregonhikers.org/field_gu...
History reference: www.oregonencyclopedia.org/ar...
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