After about ten days of fairly good travel along the Humboldt River road, California-bound emigrants reached a point where they faced their first major physical challenge on the route. Continuing beside the river would soon bring them to Palisades Canyon, which was too narrow for wagons, so they had no choice but to leave the Humboldt River and climb. From near this spot they traveled 18 steep miles, roughly along the route of present-day I-80, over ridges and down canyons before reaching the Humboldt again at Gravelly Ford. In the hot, dry months of July and August, they usually arrived here having completed about three quarters of their 2,000-mile journey from the Missouri River to California and having traveled for more than four months, yet this hardship was only one of many they had already endured and many more still lay ahead.