Our Quest for Faith

We just returned from our Stake's Faith Quest 2010. Our stake took all the Young men and Young women on a week long adventure, that included a trip to Salt Lake to the Church History Museum, and 3 days in Wyoming following in the Willie/Martin handcart company's footsteps, pulling a handcart. We left early on Monday morning and took 4 buses down to Salt Lake. We spent the afternoon at the church history museum and on Temple Square. We hopped back on the buses and headed back to Ogden to our motel where we had a pizza party and later a fireside given by a great grandson of James Wille, captain of the ill-fated handcart company in 1856. It was a great introduction to what we were about to see and do.
Tom and I were a "Ma and a Pa" and our family consisted of 3 girls and 5 boys and we were the Chislett family.
We got up early (4:30 am) again on Tuesday morning and got the buses all loaded and drove to Martin's Cove in Wyoming where we spent the afternoon pulling our handcarts 6 miles around the cove. A highlight was the Sweetwater Crossing. The Teachers and the Deacons pulled the handcarts across the river
and the Priests carried all the young women in a reenactment of what the "Valley Boys" did in 1856 in their rescue of the Martin Handcart company.
Everyone was so reverent and the spirit was really strong.
We got back on the buses and drove an hour to the Willie Center at the 6th Crossing, where we had to unload the bus, load our handcarts and carry our stuff a mile and then set up our camp. We had 3 tents to set up and by the time everything was set up it was 10 pm and they served us a supper of broth and biscuits to emulate the shortage of food that the Willie and Martin handcart companies experienced.
We got to bed and woke up at 7 am and ate breakfast and hit the trail.


We did the 10 mile trail and spent the morning pushing and pulling in the warm Wyoming sun. We stopped for lunch on the trail and then started up a hill. Gradually the men dropped off the cart and left just me and my 3 little girls to pull the cart about a 1/2 mile up to the top of a ridge.

It was called the "woman's pull" and it is to demonstrate how the pioneer women and girls often were left on their own with sick husbands and family and would have to pull their carts on their own. It was a very emotional experience. Sitting at the top of the ridge after the "women's pull" a huge lightning storm blew in. We hurried down the hill and left the handcarts and spread out in a gully to wait out the storm. Lightning crashed all around us and it rained and hailed and blew and blew.

Wyoming weather is WILD! After about 20 minutes, the storm blew over and we were on our way again. Unbeknown to us, was that the same storm had struck our camp and blew all of our tents down and some away and flooded everything. It was a mess. We continued on several more miles and did 3 river crossings

and the Ma's ended up going back to camp early to help clean up the "wind blown" campsite. I had to mop out our three tents and set them back up again and dry out everyone's sleeping bags. The boy's tent had 2 broken tent poles. It was an exhausting day. That night the missionary couples had a square dance and the youth LOVED it.
We got up early again the next morning and took our camp down and loaded everything onto the bus and headed for Rocky Ridge. We got on the trail at about 9 am. Rocky Ridge is a 15 mile trail up and over Rocky ridge that the Willie handcart company had to do in the middle of a blinding snow storm. It took some of the pioneers 27 hours to arrive at Rock Hollow and the next morning 15 pioneers were dead. We did it with full bellies with perfect weather conditions and it was HARD.
Thankfully we had strong men and boys that pushed and pulled the whole way through 5 or 6 mud holes.


We were on the trail from 9 am to 6:30. We ate lunch on the trail.



My feet were very sore at the end, It was Hot! but we all made it. It was a very rewarding experience. We had to set our tents up when we got into camp, but then we played in the river and had a delicious dinner. That night we had a wonderful testimony meeting. We sat in Rock Hollow surrounded by the mass gravesite and you could feel the spirits of the pioneers. I looked up at the rocks surrounding us and the firelight and flashlights were casting a shadow on the rocks. It looked like the pioneers surrounded us. It was a humbling and spiritual experience. We got up early on Friday morning and took down our tents and packed up the bus and headed to Boise. We left Rock Hollow at 8 am and got back to Boise at 8:40 pm. It was a long day of riding a bus, but it was a wonderful trip and we're so glad we could go on the Stake's quest for faith. We all learned we can do very hard things.