Pendleton Round-Up Wagon Train: “On the Trail”

Back in June when I was at home on vacation visiting my family in Oregon I had the opportunity to experience a few days at the annual Pendleton Round-Up Wagon Train. This week-long family event has been around since 1982 and is an opportunity for people to bring their horses and teams to experience a week in the beautiful Blue Mountains and recreate the wagon train experience that the pioneers had on the Oregon Trail. This is the second year that my parents have been the event’s official caterer. While I was there I was able to tag along on the morning route for two days before heading back to camp with my dad who met the wagons and riders out on the trail for lunch. This is an incredibly unique, fun event filled with history, beautiful animals and salt of the earth people.

This part one of five posts. With so many pictures, I struggled with what was the best way to split them up across a few blog posts, but in the end I decided to organize them based on a few themes. So what you see is not in any type of chronological order and covers the two and a half days that I was there. Enjoy!

If you missed them you can view:
Part Two “Circling the Wagons” HERE
Part Three “Cookin’ Spoo Style” HERE
Part Four “All in the Family” HERE
Part Five “Horsemanship is in the Details” HERE

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For many years, the wagon train group would actually move camp each day or every couple of days but more recently they’ve kept a base camp and go out on different routes from there each day. There are outriders, folks that just bring their horses to ride, and then there are the teams (both horses and mules) that pull the wagons. There are also a few single-horse carts. The first day I went out with the Meyers family (who I’ll share more about in an upcoming post) and their two teams. The second day I rode with Jill Perrine and her single-horse cart.

It takes an incredible amount of attention to detail, skill and teamwork for everything to go smoothly on these rides. I really enjoyed learning and taking it all in. Even though my family has never had horses, I have always really loved them and I was so memorized watching them work. Some folks go all in on this event and make an effort to make their wagon historically accurate. And some even wear period specific clothing! And if you’ve been a regular reader here you know that I think that the Blue Mountains are God’s country, so I was so happy to be along for the ride and the opportunity to capture it all with my camera.