National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center

Flagstaff Hill, five miles east of Baker City, is where Oregon Trail emigrants coming off the dry stretch of Virtue Flat got their first look at the Baker and Powder River valleys and the Elkhorn Mountains, with the Blue Mountains still to cross. The route can still be traced across Virtue Flat below, and about a mile of wagon ruts lies on the center's own grounds.

The center is here because Baker City needed it. Local leaders looking for a way to revive a struggling economy formed the nonprofit Oregon Trail Preservation Trust and brought in the Bureau of Land Management, the state and the county; the center opened in May 1992, a year before the trail's sesquicentennial, and drew some two and a half million visitors over the next three decades. It closed during the pandemic and then for a $6.5 million renovation that made it a net-zero-energy building, and reopened in May 2024.

Inside are life-size dioramas of the trail, the mountain men, mining and the Native peoples the emigrants passed through, and a theater. Outside are a wagon encampment where living-history programs run in summer, a gold-mine stamp mill, and about four miles of trails, the most walked of them leading down to the ruts. The hill is named for the Flagstaff gold mine beneath it.