A Little Late

Warning: long post!
Ok so this post is overdue. I'm finally going to give a report on trek. A little late, yes, but this blog is in need of some posting, so here goes:

First of all, we started with meetings and emails and information packets several months before we ever left. In each one, they asked us to pray for the Spirit to be with us so that the youth and everyone involved could grow closer to Christ. I can say that all that prayer paid off - we definitely felt the Spirit!

They put us in families, a ma and a pa and about 8 children per family. We were "Dow's Dots". D.O.T.S. stands for Depend On The Savior. (thanks to JoAn for that one). So that was the theme for our family flag, cheer, and song. We took dots stickers and dots candy and passed them around and really spread the "DOTS" idea. It was great. Each family then belonged to a company. We were in the orange company along with 4 other families. There were 4 companies all together. We trekked together as a company, each family with their own handcart. Each morning we placed our belongings (each person's belongings were carried in a 5-gallon bucket) into our handcart, filled up our 5-gallon water container, and off we went. We trekked between 3-6 miles each day, stopping at designated stations along the way. At each station they had a "vignette" as they called them, short presentations. This is where the feeling the spirit part came in. They had people dressed as various characters in pioneer history, telling their story through word and song, with such power that you couldn't help but be touched and even cry! For example, one day we hiked a particularly steep hillside that took a lot of effort on everyone's part. It was Rocky Ridge. After reaching the top, they had a shallow grave depicted with the shoes of those who had died facing inward in a circle. They had soft music playing as one by one about 6 people in our group stood while a pre-recorded narrative was played about a real person in pioneer history who had died at Rocky Ridge. After their story ended, each one laid down in that circle, with their feet facing inward. One of our "sons" from our family was one of those. He told the story of the 11 yr. old boy who carried his 9 yr. old brother for miles in the snow, finally reached camp, set his brother down, then sat down and died. They covered the shallow grave with a sheet and then we all had to walk away. We were all sobbing! It felt like we were really leaving our son.
Another depiction was the Sweetwater River Crossing. We arrived at a river, and we listened while they played Pres. Hinckley's narration of the pioneer teenage boys who carried everyone else across the freezing water one by one, and then later died of the effects. He gets choked up at one point as he's talking. As he names the pioneer boys who did this, one by one 4 teenage boys from our company step forward, dressed in white shirts. A girl then begins playing her violin softly as those boys proceed to carry each person one at a time across the river, even the adults (carried by two or three boys at a time). They had asked everyone to remain silent, so as to be able to feel the Spirit. When they got to me, 2 boys joined arms and picked me up. By now they had carried several others across in knee-deep water, and I could tell they were working hard. They were breathing heavy and it seemed like such a sweet service they were performing, that I was extremely touched and began to cry (again!). I felt a small piece of the gratitude those exhausted pioneers must have felt.
The last story I'll share is the Mormon Batallion. At one point along the trail, we were approached by soldiers saying they needed volunteers to join the battalion. All of the men and boys in our company then left! So now it was just us women and girls left to push our handcarts. I only had 3 girls in my family, two of them weighed about 95 pounds, the other about 110. I thought "how hard can it be, we can push this handcart". (The handcarts fully loaded weigh about 500 pounds. ) Well, then we came to a VERY steep mountain. We had only taken about 5 steps and I could tell we were in deep trouble. 3 puny girls and me with my weak shoulder were going to have to push this 500-pound handcart all the way up a very steep mountain by ourselves? No way! Each step felt like such hard work that I couldn't imagine taking another step, and then somehow I would take another step, but that one felt like it had to be my last, and so on. Then it seemed to get just a tiny bit easier. I looked, and there was one of our sweet stake leaders who had come to help us push our handcart. I was sooo grateful! Not far up the hill, we started noticing all the men and boys from our company who had left us were now kneeling all along the edges of the trail, all the way up the mountain, with their hats in their hands, humming the song "The Spirit of God". They looked into our faces as we passed with looks that seemed to say "I wish I could help you". And I wished they could have helped us also! It was sooooooo hard, I honestly didn't know if we were going to be able to make it to the top. I was sweating profusely, and breathing so hard I thought my chest would burst. Several points along the way I just wanted to start crying, but then I would look into the face of one of those boys, as if they were saying "Keep going, you can do it", and I was able to go on. We finally made it to the top, and I was so glad. My little exhausted daughters then went back down and started helping the other families behind us push their handcarts. I couldn't let them help alone, so I found myself going back down to help too, even though I could barely walk at this point! This experience gave me new appreciation for all the women whose husbands got sick or died along the way and had to carry on alone. How did they do it? The Lord must have strengthened them. And my thoughts can't help but go to all the people who need our help nowadays. Some people are "pushing their handcarts" all alone! Let's watch out for those people and help where we can.

Trek was amazing, this post is really long though, so I can't tell more. Go see 17 Miracles and it will get you in the pioneer spirit for July 24th, Pioneer Day. You'll appreciate those wonderful pioneers. We all owe them a lot.