Santa Fe and Salt Lake Trail Monument

The road this spire marks never had a name everyone agreed on. Salt Lake to Los Angeles by way of the Old Spanish Trail, it was the winter route, open when the Sierra was shut, and one historian of it calls it the most difficult wagon road in American history. Eight members of the San Bernardino pioneer society put the monument up in 1917 and cut their own names into the base. The arrows on the upper spire point where the road ran; the name is their best guess.

What the plaque says

Erected in honor of the brave pioneers of California in 1917 by pioneers Sheldon Stoddard, Sydney P. Waite, John Brown Jr., George Miller, George M. Cooley, Silas C. Cox, Richard Weir, Jasper N. Corbett.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cajon Pass — 2.5 mi
  The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.
• Lake Gregory — 11 mi
  A New Deal dam built by a Redlands orange grower, for the opposite reason to every other lake on this mountain.
• Kaiser Steel Mill Site — 15 mi
  The mill that made Fontana a steel town, gave the country Kaiser Permanente, and drew a color line at Base Line Road.
• Wigwam Motel — 15 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.

More markers nearby

• Stoddard-Waite Monument — steps away
• Mormon Trail Monument — 4.7 mi
• Sycamore Grove — 7.5 mi
• Garcés-Smith Monument — 7.7 mi