Pony Express trail · Station VI of 12 covered
Davis Mountain and Skull Valley
The descent into Skull Valley, and the beginning of country that people have been leaving for a century.
Position Skull Valley, Tooele County, Utah · approximate, no coordinate on record
Skull Valley is a long north-south trough between the Stansbury and Cedar mountains, and its name has been earning itself since the emigrant era. The Pony Express crossed its southern end.
This is also the approach to Iosepa, a settlement founded in 1889 by more than two hundred Polynesian members of the Latter-day Saint church and abandoned in 1917. It is a ghost town with a cemetery that is still visited every Memorial Day, which makes it a very different sort of ruin from the mining camps.
Davis Mountain sits at the edge of all this, an outlier of the Simpson range with the trail passing beneath it.
This is remote, unpaved country with no fuel, no water and thin phone coverage for a hundred miles. Carry more water than you think you need, tell somebody your route, and do not attempt the crossing in a low car after rain. The BLM manages most of the road; call the Salt Lake Field Office for current conditions rather than trusting any page, including this one.