Spanish explorers and traders traveled nearly 100 miles through Iron County on routes now followed by major highways. Enoch, now the second largest city in Iron County, was once a major trading post along the Northern Route of the Old Spanish Trail in the mid-1800s. Traders carried New Mexico serapes and other woolen goods to Los Angeles and drove California-bred horses and mules back to Santa Fe. In 1829, Mexican trader Antonia Armijo led the first successful commercial caravan across a viable overland route through the deserts and mountains of Mexico's far northern frontier, following indigenous footpaths and earlier trade and exploration routes that formed the trail network known as the Old Spanish Trail. Traveling east from California in 1844, John C. Fremont followed the trail into Parowan Valley before leaving it, and his maps and diaries of its western section later guided Mormon settlers who developed it into a wagon-passable route to Los Angeles by 1847. In 1848, Orville Pratt described the descent of Little Creek as extremely steep and difficult, but on reaching Parowan Valley he praised it as one of the finest and most extensive valleys he had seen in the western country. The trail's routes came together at Fork of Roads east of present-day Barstow in the Mojave Desert, then crossed Cajon Pass between the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains toward coastal California, with an easy two to three days of travel remaining to San Gabriel Mission and Los Angeles. The Northern Route, first blazed by William Wolfskill and George C. Yount in 1831, ran northwest from Abiquiu through southern Colorado and central Utah, avoiding the Colorado River canyons encountered by Armijo and taking advantage of better water and pasture before rejoining his route near Las Vegas. The North Branch followed trapper and trade routes through the Rio Grande Gorge to Taos and southern Colorado, then west through Cochetopas Pass and up the Gunnison River Valley to rejoin the Northern Route near present-day Green River, Utah. The Mojave Road was a 188-mile crossing of the Mojave Desert long used by area Indians, Spanish explorers, and missionaries, and first traveled by Jedediah Smith in 1826. The Armijo Route, the first complete trip across the trail, began in Abiquiu northwest of Santa Fe, continued to the San Juan River and then west to the Virgin River, used the Crossing of the Fathers cut into a rock canyon wall some 75 years earlier by the Dominguez-Escalante party, and went down the Muddy River and across the Mojave Desert to the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers, through Cajon Pass, and on to Mission San Gabriel.