The Old Spanish Trail became a network of routes linking New Mexico and Los Angeles for trade in woolen goods, horses, and mules across the remote deserts and mountains of Mexico's far northern frontier. In 1829, Mexican trader Antonio Armijo led the first successful commercial caravan, following indigenous footpaths and earlier trade and exploration routes to forge the trail system. Traveling east from California in 1844, John C. Fremont followed the trail to the Parowan Valley before leaving it, and his maps and diaries of its western section helped guide Mormon settlers, who developed it into a wagon-passable path to Los Angeles in 1847. Orville Pratt's 1848 expedition left one of the better documented accounts, describing the severe descent of Little Creek and then the sudden sight of the broad Parowan Valley. In Iron County, Spanish explorers traveled nearly 100 miles along routes now followed by major highways, and Enoch later became a major trading post along the Northern Route in the mid-1800s. All routes came together at the Fork of Roads east of present-day Barstow in the Mojave Desert, then crossed Cajon Pass between the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains on the way to coastal California, from which traders had an easier two to three days to San Gabriel Mission and Los Angeles. The Northern Route, first blazed by William Wolfskill and George C. Yount in 1831, ran northwest from Abiquiú through southern Colorado and central Utah, avoiding the Colorado River canyons encountered by Armijo's party and using better water and pasture before rejoining Armijo's route near Las Vegas. The Mojave Road was a 188-mile desert crossing long used by Indians, Spanish explorers, and missionaries, and first traveled by American trapper Jedediah Smith in 1826. The North Branch followed trapper and trade routes through the Rio Grande Gorge to Taos and southern Colorado, then west through Cochetona Pass and up the Gunnison River Valley to rejoin the Northern Route near present-day Green River, Utah. The Armijo Route, the first complete trip across the trail, began in Abiquiú, followed established trails to the San Juan River and then west to the Virgin River, used the Crossing of the Fathers cut into a rock canyon wall by the Dominguez-Escalante party about 75 years earlier, and continued down the Muddy River, across the Mojave Desert, to the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers, through Cajon Pass, and on to Mission San Gabriel.