Guernsey Ruts deep wagon ruts
— — five feet of stone worn down by iron rims and oxen.
Not only on a wall.
“A short walk south of Guernsey, Wyoming, a soft sandstone ridge carries one of the clearest surviving stretches of the Oregon Trail. Wagons coming up from Fort Laramie were funnelled across this single saddle by the North Platte on one side and broken country on the other; iron-rimmed wheels and oxen feet cut the stone as much as five feet deep over roughly two decades of heavy use in the mid-1800s. The grooves are still there, dry and pale, and a plain interpretive path runs alongside them. From the studio.
Guernsey Ruts deep wagon ruts, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Guernsey Ruts, formally the Oregon Trail Ruts National Historic Landmark, sit on a low sandstone ridge about a mile south of Guernsey, Wyoming, in Platte County. The site preserves a roughly half-mile stretch of trail tread that emigrant wagons cut into the soft Casper Formation sandstone, in places to a depth of about five feet. The ruts were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and are managed by Wyoming State Parks together with the nearby Register Cliff. The trailhead has a small parking lot, panels, and a short interpretive path.
The local sandstone is soft enough that an iron-rimmed wheel under a loaded wagon, repeated thousands of times over roughly two decades, cut a permanent groove rather than wearing flat. The ridge sat on the only practical crossing for wagons north of the North Platte at this point, so traffic was funnelled into one narrow track. The deepest visible cut is about five feet below the surrounding rock. Register Cliff, three miles east, carries thousands of emigrant signatures scratched into the same Casper Formation sandstone between roughly 1843 and 1869.
Between roughly 1841 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, an estimated 400,000 emigrants crossed this corridor on the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails on their way west from Fort Laramie 14 miles to the east. Traffic peaked in the early 1850s, after the California gold strike and during the early Mormon migration. The Guernsey crossing was unavoidable; wagons coming north from Fort Laramie had to climb this ridge. By the time the rails opened, the cut here was already deep enough that travellers wrote about it in their journals.