Lampasas, Texas - Pioneer Trek - Part 1

Dear Friends:

This week, I spent three days in Lampasas, Texas as part of a Pioneer Trek.  This activity was a three-day, 12-mile reenactment of the 1856-1860 migration of Mormon Pioneers from Iowa & Nebraska to the Great Salt Lake Valley. After being driven out of their settlements and communities, many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints could not afford covered wagons and oxen to make the trek west. Instead, they modeled handcarts after street sweepers and pulled them along the 1,300 mile trail to religious freedom.  This trek was a way to help all of the LDS youth in the Austin area to appreciate the sacrifices that these pioneers made to preserve our faith.  In addition, we really wanted the youth, age 14-18, to understand that they, too, are pioneers in the way that they live their faith every day.

We had over 150 youth participate.  Each youth was assigned to a “family” of approximately
10 young men & women. Each family were led by a “Ma" and "Pa” - a couple from our church who volunteered to create a family environment during the trek, and help teach these youth along the way.

I was lucky enough to be in charge of this entire experience.  I've never planned this large of an activity before - but thank goodness I surrounded myself with really smart people who worked hard to make this an amazing experience for the youth.

We began the adventure at one of our local meetinghouses.  There, we had all 150 youth "check-in" and make sure they had appropriate permission slips, equipment and clothing.  Yes, we had everyone dress in period costume, to try and make it just a little more real.

We had all of the youth meet with their Ma and Pa, to help them get acquainted with each other, and make sure that any concerns or worries were addressed, before we left.

We then gathered all the youth together and helped them understand why we were going on this adventure - and to help them see that finishing hard things will help them throughout their lives.  I had the opportunity to speak to them right before they left:

We then organized everyone into vehicles, along with their gear.  We limited each participant to one 5-gallon bucket.  This meant that they had to store all of their equipment and clothing inside these buckets - which also acted as chairs during the trek:

Although I had a smile on my face, this was pure chaos - getting every kid into a vehicle ; )

We then traveled for about 90 minutes northwest of Austin, to Lampasas.  We held this event on a large ranch, just outside of the town.  When we reached the starting point, the handcarts that we prepared were all ready to go!

A simply gorgeous day to start the trek!

We moved all the kids and adults into carts - no easy feat - and got them on the trail as quickly as possible.

I spent a lot of time trying to get them out of the starting gate ; )

During the first mile-and-a-half, we created little “scenes” of miracles that took place along the handcart trail.  Many of them were depicted in the movie 17 Miracles.

We then continued on the trail, giving the youth just a few miles to get used to how the carts felt, and how to shift kids to different tasks and keep them engaged in the effort.

We arrived at our first campsite - a large open area where we created two separate camp areas for sleeping.  One was for the young men and the other for the young women.  We then had the families gather together to prepare their evening meal.

Since there’s still a severe drought in Central Texas, we aren’t allowed to have open fires.  We instead did all of our cooking in dutch ovens using coals.  We had the coals ready for the families when they arrived.  I was so proud of each family as they delegated a variety of preparation tasks to each youth and managed to have a good time.

fter a wonderful meal, the families each held devotionals where they talked about the more spiritual aspects of the day’s events.  It was a great teaching moment, for sure.

By the time everything was finished, it was pretty late - around 11pm.  The kids went to sleep.  What they didn’t see was all of the work that went into preparing for the next day’s events.  I had a team of people that prepared all of the food items for each family.  I was humbled to watch this crew working until well after midnight - having to get up around 6am the next day.

I arose at about 5:30am, as I was responsible for waking up all of the Ma and Pa couples in camp.  We met with all of the adult leaders, to prepare them for the day, and talk about what worked well and what we could improve.  I loved those early-morning meetings with these dedicated volunteers.

One interesting thing that we did, was to give each family a “baby”.  As was the case with the original pioneers, some parents didn’t survive the trek across the plains.  Several families had to adopt children, to get them safely to the Great Salt Lake Valley.  We created “flour babies” - basically bags of flour that symbolized these adopted children. We wanted to see if they could handle the extra load, and to share responsibility amongst the children:

We all prepared a wonderful breakfast and packed up the handcarts to head out onto the trail:

That’s it for this post.  I’ll pick up the story in the next blog post where we’ll cover some amazing experiences on the trail!