Old Spanish Trail
The 19th-century trade route between Santa Fe and Los Angeles that threaded the Virgin River country.
The Hardest Trade Route in America
Before highways, before railroads, mule caravans hauled New Mexican wool blankets west and California horses and mules east along the Old Spanish Trail — a punishing route between Santa Fe and Los Angeles that historians have called the longest, crookedest, most arduous pack-mule trail in America.
One of its main branches dropped through this region along the Virgin River corridor, making the future Arizona Strip and Virgin Valley part of a continental trade story decades before any permanent settlement.
Tracing the Trail Today
Congress designated the route a National Historic Trail, jointly administered by the National Park Service and the BLM. There is no single groomed path to hike — the trail today is a corridor of historic sites, interpretive markers, and landscape that remains remarkably close to what the muleteers saw.
In this region, modern I-15 and the old river crossings near Littlefield and Mesquite roughly shadow the historic route. Watching the canyon walls slide past from the Virgin River Gorge, it is worth remembering that traders once made this same passage at two miles an hour. Trail history and maps live at the official NPS trail page.
Stand Where the Story Happened
The Strip's landmarks put two centuries of Southwest history underfoot.