Pacific State Travel Tips
Throughout the Pacific states, trails and routes honed by its earliest explorers and settlers continue to be important links to spectacular sights, places of historic significance and popular vacation destinations. These early pathways served many masters who took claim on land, chartered overland routes and took chanced opportunity for new lives and fortunes.
California Missions Trail was one of the region’s earliest highways, established at a time when Alta California was under Spanish rule. Franciscan Father Junipero
Serra lead an expedition into California, building a chain of missions that also served as a supply route to northern military Presidios and as bases for Spanish colonization.
Twenty-one missions were built between 1769 and 1823 along a 600-mile route from San Diego to Sonoma. Called El Camino Real, or Royal Road, the padres marked the trail by sprinkling mustard seeds and creating a path of bright yellow flowers. After California statehood, the road became a busy stage coach route
and later bronze mission bells were placed on the now modern highways to indicate the location of the original El Camino Real path.
Highway 101 and Interstate 5 between San Diego and Los Angeles parallel El Camino Real. The missions remain as monuments to their role in California’s history and continue to be active parishes. Most structures have been restored or replicated and at many locations, California State Parks operates cultural
and living history sites and programs. The route of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery enters Oregon and Washington at the Idaho border and follows the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean.
A century later the Columbia River Highway was constructed from 1913-22 between Troutdale and The Dalles on the southern edge of the river. This was the first modern highway to be built in the Northwest and the first U.S. designated scenic highway. By the 1930s, the highway was extended to travel from Astoria on the Pacific coast to the east connecting with the Old Oregon Trail Highway that leads to Boise, Idaho.
The 108-mile-long Klondike Highway between Skagway, Alaska and Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and continuing on to Dawson, is one of the region’s oldest coastal access routes to the interior. It was carved out by the First Nation people and more than 30,000 prospectors traversed this treacherous route on foot during the Klondike Gold Rush.
By Elana Andersen
Courtesy of leisuregrouptravel.com
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