Sycamore Grove

Four hundred and thirty-seven people left Payson, Utah in March 1851 with a hundred and fifty wagons, and the advance party reached this grove on the eleventh of June. They stayed for months. One traveller called it the most beautiful spot, a small valley of large sycamores with clover nearly waist high, and it had been a watering stop on the Old Spanish Trail long before any of them saw it. The purchase of the Lugo rancho did not close until October, so the colony was a camp first.

What the plaque says

This campsite on both the Mojave Trail over the mountains and the Cajon Pass Route was probably first seen by Spanish and American travelers in the 1770's and was noted by them in 1806, 1849 and 1850. Michael White, grantee in 1843 of the Muscupiabe Rancho lived near by. The Mormon colony camped in 1851 on either side of this little pass for about four months while Amasa Lyman, Charles Rich, Jefferson Hunt, David Seely and Andrew Lytle negotiated the purchase of the San Bernardino Rancho from the Lugo family.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Gregory — 7.3 mi
  A New Deal dam built by a Redlands orange grower, for the opposite reason to every other lake on this mountain.
• Wigwam Motel — 7.8 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.
• Cajon Pass — 8.0 mi
  The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.
• Original McDonald's Site — 8.7 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.

More markers nearby

• Garcés-Smith Monument — 3.9 mi
• Mormon Road — 6.6 mi
• Stoddard-Waite Monument — 7.3 mi
• Santa Fe and Salt Lake Trail Monument — 7.5 mi