Mission to Martin's Cove: April 17, 2014 to October 10, 2014

We have been gone on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and since we returned we have been repairing, renovating and re-renting some of our income property, so there were no posts on this blog since May of 2014. Actually in that last post we were living in the Missionary Village in Muddy Gap, Wyoming and about a month into the mission.

Senior Missionaries have different rules than young missionaries, so I could have written, but just didn't have time, and I slept good every night. (So I didn't need to do something when I couldn't go back to sleep.)

Martin's Cove is between Casper, Wyoming in the north and Rawlins, Wyoming in the south, about an hour's drive from either. There is nothing in between but sage brush, mountains and wind.

Wind is blowing the flags horizontally, on a warm day

Wind is the one thing you first notice in Martin's Cove. It blows in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, when it's raining, when it's snowing, when it's sunny, when it's hot and when it's cold.

Sometimes it blows hard. Like the time it lifted the tents of a company of youth and carried them fifty yards. The young people were camping at Cherry Creek Campground a few miles from the Martin's Cove Visitors' Center.

Sometimes it blows softly, like on a hot summer day when we were out on the trail with twenty-five or more handcarts and over a hundred youth pulling them, reenacting the 1856 trek of the Mormon Pioneers from England who couldn't afford wagons and oxen.

Then........ 1856,  the wind was a killer.

It and the cold, and exhaustion and starvation were the cause of the deaths of at least 139 members of the Martin Handcart Company, in and around Martin's Cove. That's why there is a visitors' center. That's why we were there on a mission: to tell the story of the Martin Handcart Company.