Ross' Hole

Ross's journal shows the month's cost. On March 15, 1824, thirty men, ten boys and fifty horses went out to break a road through five feet of snow and made three miles, the horses swimming through it. A cry of enemies on March 20 turned out to be six Nez Perce who had crossed the mountains on snowshoes in five days. Buffalo hunters came back snow-blind. On April 10 a drum and a fiddle made in camp gave the men a concert, and the crews returned to the road. They crossed Gibbons Pass on April 15.

What the plaque says

Ross' Hole Alexander Ross, of the Hudson Bay Company, with 55 Indian and white trappers, 89 women and children and 392 horses, camped near here on March 12, 1824, enroute from Spokane House near present Spokane, Washington to the Snake River country of southern Idaho. Nearly a month was spent here in a desperate attempt to break through the deep snow across the pass to the Big Hole, and from their hardships and tribulations, Ross called this basin "The Valley of Troubles." Originally built in 1921, the Sula Community Store is the center of a rural district established in 1889 by Wood "Longhair" Thompson. Ross' Hole was initially settled by cattle ranchers, including Thompson and his daughter Ursula, from whom the community takes its name. By the third decade of the twentieth century, the Sula area included the store / post office, a school, and nearly 200 people. By then, farmers grew crops and tended orchards in the valley. One writer described Sula "a site set like a diamond stud in the center of the beautiful vale of Ross' Hole, one of the prettiest spots in the Rocky Mountains."

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Big Hole National Battlefield — 21 mi
  The government marked this ground for its soldiers in 1883 and left the Nimiipuu camp outside the line until the 1960s.

More markers nearby

• Mountains on the Move — steps away
• First Impressions — steps away
• Survival — steps away
• The Great Clearing — steps away