The view from this height, four hundred feet above Willow Springs, gave emigrants a sense of the West’s dramatic beauty and grand scale. Many pioneers, weary from the climb, were humbled by the panorama, reflected on familiar places and loved ones, and bade farewell to the Great Plains as they turned their attention to the hardships ahead. Descending westward, they watched the outline of Red Buttes disappear and continued toward Independence Rock and the Sweetwater River. Travelers also observed the region’s striking skies, with clouds stretched into streamers hundreds of miles long or compressed into thin discs that signaled high winds, and in some late Julys massive cumulus clouds rose tens of thousands of feet high, crowned with hail that could throw a wagon company and its livestock into disarray. Many kept detailed diaries that now help show how much or how little the West has changed. Aside from modern electric transmission lines to the north, the landscape remains nearly as it appeared in the 1940s. East of here at the end of July 1864, Mary Ringo lost her husband and wrote of the sorrow she carried from his grave; a week later she passed this way with her five children, aged fourteen to two years old. Mary, of Gallatin, Daviess County, Missouri, was on foot in the wilderness, pregnant with her sixth child, and bound for California.