Santa Fe Trail (Mountain Route)

Visited: July 2020 and March 2018

Duration: 2-3 days

Location: Cimarron Kansas to Las Vegas, New Mexico

On this blog we will be following the Mountain Route of the Santa Fe Trail. We did this in 2 parts, we did the Kansas/Colorado sites on our National Park trip Season 5 and the southern part we did on a Spring Break trip in 2018. Follow along with the book at the link below.

Junior Wagon Master Mountain and Cimarron Routes

If you missed the early blogs about the Santa Fe Trail no worries, you can find them here:

Santa Fe Trail Eastern Terminus blog

Santa Fe Trail Central Route blog

Here we go!! We left Dodge City and headed to Cimarron Kansas looking for Cimarron Crossing Park, this took us awhile because we used GPS (not suggested). We finally found the park and it took awhile to find the informational sign we needed to answer the questions in the book but nevertheless we prevailed.

Moving along west our next stop along the trail is the Colorado/Kansas Marker. Here we stopped and recorded what was written on the marker. Now obviously anyone with a clue would not need to stop here and could answer the questions but we needed a state line sign picture taken with Grandma Carol who joined us on this trip 🙂

The next page in our book wanted us to head to Lamar, Colorado and check out the Pioneer Mother at the Colorado Visitor Center (we opted to find a picture of her and answer the questions, otherwise we won’t make it to our side trip). This can easily be googled, shhhh.

We did make our side trip though and got a picture to attach to our books.

Up next in the book was Bent’s Old Fort, hit this site the next morning. It was open to the public and had some great things to do. We enjoyed this place, you can check it out in it’s own blog.

Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site

At Bent’s Old Fort visiting and getting a signature from a ranger will get you this page done in the Junior Wagon Master book. Checked off!! We also opted to do the Junior Ranger at this site as well. Why not?

Next stop Boggsville, Colorado here you need to visit the Boggs house and pick up a brochure and answer a question in your booklet. In reality the question can be answered by reading the plaque in the book, which is what we did.

The next task is located in Trinidad, Colorado. Here we visited the The Trinidad Santa Fe Trail Museum to view a coat that is displayed there. We had to answer a question about what we thought this coat was used for.

This is where we leave you on our NPT Season 5 trip and head to Colorado to finish out all of the National Parks of Colorado. We pick up from National Park Trip Season 3 – Spring Break when we stopped at Fort Union National Monument.

Next stop in the book we have already done 🙂

Here visiting the site and doing the Junior Ranger at Fort Union gets you a task done in your Junior Wagon Master book. Good thing I save all the Junior Ranger books. This got us our check mark and completion of the Mountain Route in the Junior Wagon Master book. We are trucking along on this trail. Only one more section to go, that we have already traveled before finding this book.

To see our complete visit to Fort Union National Monument visit the link below.

Fort Union National Monument

Check back for the Western Terminus, coming soon.

Thanks for following us on this journey it was so much fun taking all of the trips and completing the books. Here is what we got after sending in all of our hard work.

Pretty darn sweet!!!