Last updated: December 11, 2023
Place
Head of Echo Canyon
NPS Photo
Quick Facts
Location:
Between Wahsatch and Echo, UT
Significance:
A nature conduit through the Wasatch Mountains, used by animals and people for thousands of years.
MANAGED BY:
Utah Department of Transportation
Pony Express Utah No. 2 Contract Station
Echo Canyon is a natural conduit through the Wasatch Mountains, used for thousands of years by wildlife and native people migrating between the Rockies and the Great Basin. Once discovered by mountain men in the early 1800s, the 24-mile passage eventually became a thoroughfare for pack trains, commercial and emigrant wagons, Forty-niner brigades, military columns, handcart processions, the Pony Express, the Overland Stage, and the transcontinental telegraph. The Donner-Reed Party was the third emigrant wagon party to pass through the canyon.
Today Echo Canyon is still a busy transportation corridor, occupied by I-80, the Union Pacific Railroad, a segment of the Old Lincoln Highway (the nation’s first coast-to-coast automobile highway), and modern communications and utility lines. More than 160 years of development have altered the canyon, but fascinating traces of 19th century uses still are visible.
As you enter I-80, look ahead and to the right toward the bare rampart of Castle Rock, an emigrant landmark near the head of Echo Canyon. The Mormon pioneer company headed by Brigham Young, who had taken ill with a tickborne infection, camped near here on July 14, 1847. The combined California, Mormon Pioneer, and Pony Express Trail ran between the two modern railroad grades, and a Pony Express and stage station once stood on the grounds of the “old automobile graveyard” that is visible from the freeway. The site is on private property, not open to the public.
Site Information
Location (between Wahsatch and Echo, UT; Westbound I-80 enters Echo Canyon between mileposts 188 and 187 southwest of Wahsatch.)