Register Cliff State Historic Site

Register Cliff was the first night's camp west of Fort Laramie, a pale, chalky face of limestone rising about a hundred feet above the North Platte bottoms, and the trains left their names on it by the thousand. The oldest date anyone has found reads 1829 This July 14. No one knows who cut it, and the suggestion that a French trapper was marking Bastille Day is only a suggestion. Most of the names belong to the heavy years of the 1840s and 1850s, and some come in sets from three generations of the same family.

Not everyone moved on. Three emigrant graves, the names unknown, lie inside an iron fence below the cliff, part of the scatter of graves that lines the trail across Wyoming. A Pony Express station and later a stage station stood nearby, and in the 1890s the cattleman Charles Guernsey, for whom the town is named, built his ranch headquarters a short distance away.

The cliff was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and is a state historic site. A path runs along the base of the cliff.