Today is the Big Day!

Today our Smith Clan is gathered over in Moffat County, Colorado, north and west of Maybell at a location best known as Bear Valley. Between approx. 1915 and 1923 several families of our relatives from Oklahoma and Texas homesteaded in that high, barren ground of northwestern Colorado but after a series of tragic deaths and failure to thrive in that remote and arid land the family packed up their homemade covered wagon and with the older children driving the cattle horseback set out to cross the Continental Divide in late fall of 1923. They all made it through the snow and cold to settle in Purcell, Colorado, now a prairie ghost town and never much more than that.

The survivors and descendants of that rugged band of pioneers are visiting the old homesteads and erecting signs with names and dates of the ones who lived and died there so that in years to come the grandchildren and great grandchildren will find it easy to locate those tracts of land in that uninhabited valley where dinosaurs once roamed. Yes, this land is just east of Dinosaur National Monument and south of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area and adjacent to that infamous Browns Park, Colorado where outlaws once holed up from the law.

But most tourists who visit those three famous sites will never know of Bear Valley, also known as Bare Valley, and rightly so. It's off the beaten trail, privately owned land with unpaved roads and no trees in sight. But it means a great deal to those of us whose grandparents and great-grandparents took their hopes and dreams up there only to come away beaten and heartbroken after leaving three of their own buried at the little cemetery in Craig.

My thoughts are with you today, my Smith Clan relatives who made the big trek to Bear Valley today. May the good weather hold, your tires stay aired, and the click, click, click of cameras echo through the valley.