Oregon Trail Tour 2026

"Am I", I thought to myself, "the same man who a few months since, was seated, a quiet student of belles-lettres, in a cushioned armchair by a sea-coal fire?"

Francis Parkman, "The Oregon Trail", 1846

For the pioneers, by the time they arrived in the Baker Valley, they had already spent over three months facing the hardships and dangers of the road. Yes, Mr. Parkman, they were certainly changed, hardened by the trip. They had just completed the brutal Burnt River Canyon stretch I wrote about yesterday. After that, the twin adjacent valleys we now call Baker and Grande Ronde meant several days of much easier travel until their next big obstacle, the Blue Mountains.

After dusty Vale, Baker City (pop, 10,000) was a treat. I stayed in the Geiser Grand Hotel, right downtown - a classic "old-school" Victorian age hotel - tall ceilings, chandelier in my room (!), and a deep bathtub perfect for a soak after my long day on the road. Baker City was a boomtown in the 1870's when gold was discovered nearby, but after the mining ended, the productive farmland combined with forestry and outdoor activities in the adjacent Blue Mountains kept it thriving. Downtown was quaint in a good way - turn of the century preserved buildings with upscale restaurants and retail establishments, clearly thriving.

It was 32 degrees the following morning, so I slept in and had a late breakfast at a local diner. My tardiness made me the only guest, so I had a long chat with the owner. She was a Baker City native, who reminisced about spending childhood summers in the forests with her family (her dad was a forester, who fertilized "supertrees" that were the biggest of their species. Forest companies protect and harvest cones from them to create the next generation of seedlings). I asked if Baker City had changed much: "We haven't seen the big boom that other areas have, but we have had a lot of people coming from places like Bend, OR (4 hours west, closer to Portland). They've cashed out to escape the crowds and have come here to get back to someplace quieter." I was less than impressed by the sourdough pancakes that were the specialty, but they were filling.

A few miles east of Baker City is the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center run by the Bureau of Land Management. Its crowded parking lot in the middle of nowhere miles from the interstate shows the appeal of the Oregon Trail lore. The displays were a great narrative of the how and the why, definitely worth the visit. Lots of interactive choices that felt straight from the game, like "you stand at the bank of the Snake River, do you pay a ferryman to go across, try to DIY it, or perhaps just try to float downstream and skip the Trail?" (kids, definitely don't float downstream, that's certain death in Hell's Canyon). I got a second opportunity to see original pioneer wagon tracks. I learned that by the 1860's, all of the good land in the Willamette Valley was taken - and so the Baker and Grande Ronde Valleys became the new destination hotspot. Enough infrastructure existed by then to get product back to Portland, and those pioneers were rewarded when the railroad arrived in Baker in 1884. As I have noted in previous blogs, towns like Baker City with interstate and rail connections have massive economic advantages.

The towns I passed through all celebrated their pioneer heritage, I've put in a few photos to illustrate. And the agricultural land was very similar to Treasure Valley (including center pivot sprinklers spraying the road, I got a soaking when I misjudged one). After lunch I climbed over a low line of hills and then coasted down into Grande Ronde Valley ("big round" in French - it is a big round valley). Outside of being drained by a different river, essentially the same as Baker. I rode through the town of Union (founded 1862, during the Civil War), filled with Victorian era buildings (I admired the Carnegie Library), and on to Le Grande, on the interstate and the biggest city in the area.

Le Grande, at the north end of the twin valleys, was the first boomtown east of the Willamette Valley. In 1862, within two weeks it went from 5 to 75 cabins (!) with three stores. From there, the claims quickly spread south and the valleys were quickly settled.

Le Grande is thriving commercially, the interstate and Eastern Oregon University bring plenty of money into the economy. But its trade is more strip mall and fast food, and the downtown is far less charming than Baker City.

My overall takeaways are similar to my Treasure Valley reflections. This was good land, but the pioneers walked on by until it became possible to get product to market, and then they flooded in. That ended up happening earlier in Oregon than further east because Oregon was more efficient at subduing its Native American residents. But that is tomorrow's story …