Lookout Pass
The climb out of Rush Valley and the first real gap in the mountains heading west.
Historic trails · Utah
The Pony Express across Utah's west desert
Eighteen months of operation, ten days coast to coast, and a chain of relay stations strung across the emptiest ground in Utah. Most of them are gone. Some you can still stand in.
The Pony Express ran for a year and a half from 1860, carrying mail between Missouri and California by relays of horse-mounted riders for the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company. It cut coast-to-coast message time to roughly ten days and it lost money the entire time. The telegraph finished it in October 1861.
What survives best is the western Utah section. The trail leaves Camp Floyd in Cedar Valley, crosses the Onaqui and Simpson ranges, then runs the length of the Great Salt Lake Desert to Deep Creek and the Nevada line. Because almost nobody lives out there, the station sites were never built over. Several are marked, a few have standing stone, and the rest are a scatter of foundation rock and a sign.
This is a station-by-station account of that stretch, kept in the order a westbound rider would have met them. Distances between stations were short by design, ten to fifteen miles, because the horses were run hard.
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.
Westbound, in order
The stations
Numbering follows the original survey order. 3 of the 12 sites below have a coordinate on record; the rest are placed by description and are marked as approximate rather than given a false precision.
Davis Mountain and Skull Valley
The descent into Skull Valley, and the beginning of country that people have been leaving for a century.
Simpson Springs
The most reliable water for fifty miles in any direction, and the best preserved station on the whole Utah stretch.
The Old Riverbed
A dry channel cut by a river that stopped flowing when the last ice age ended.
Dugway Pass and Black Rock Station
A steep cut through the Dugway range, and a station named for the volcanic rock beside it.
Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge
Ten thousand acres of spring-fed marsh in the middle of a salt desert, and the strangest thing on the route.
Fish Springs to Boyd Station
The leg where the desert gives way to the first grass, and one of the few stations with standing walls.
Willow Springs Station
The station that became a town, and one of the last inhabited places on the route.
Round Station, Deep Creek Canyon and Overland Canyon
Where the trail leaves the flat and goes into the mountains, through the canyon that gave everyone trouble.
Canyon Station and Deep Creek Canyon
The original Canyon Station site, in a place chosen for shelter and later regretted for it.
The Canyon Station attack
In July 1863 the station was attacked and burned, and the men there were killed.
Deep Creek
The last Utah station before Nevada, under the highest mountains in the western desert.
Before you drive it
- Can you drive the Pony Express trail in an ordinary car?
- In dry weather most of the graded road is passable in a normal car, but sections turn to impassable mud after rain and the canyon stretches near Deep Creek are rough enough to want higher clearance. Conditions change quickly; the BLM Salt Lake Field Office holds current status.
- Is there fuel or water along the route?
- No. There is no fuel between Cedar Valley and the far side of the desert, and no drinking water, including at Simpson Springs where the campground has vault toilets but no supply. Carry everything you need and fill up before you leave the paved road.
- Which station is best preserved?
- Simpson Springs. The building standing there today is a reconstruction on the original site using original stone where it survived, and it is the only place on the Utah stretch where the shape of a station is legible rather than described on a sign.
- How long did the Pony Express actually operate?
- Eighteen months. It began in 1860 and stopped in October 1861, two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed. It cut coast to coast message time to about ten days and lost money throughout.
Background
What the Pony Express actually was Eighteen months, a private company, a financial disaster, and a legend out of all proportion to any of it. One hundred and fifty years on Why the route survived when almost every other nineteenth century trail was built over. Utah Everything else on this site in the same state