and then followed the Sonora Road from there west to the pueblo of Los Angeles. Southern Route of the California Trail The first large use of the route pioneered by Hunt and the Veterans were hundreds of late arriving Forty-niners, and some parties of Mormons, both packers and teamsters, looking to avoid the fate of the Donner Party, by using this snow free route into California in the fall and winter of 1849–1850. From Parowan onward to the southwest, the original route closely followed the route of the Old Spanish Trail diverting from that route between the Virgin River at Halfway Wash to Resting Springs, following the cutoff discovered by John Frémont on his return from California in 1844. This road only diverted to find places that could be traversed by the wagons of Mormon and Forty-niner parties that pioneered it. The principal change was the shortcut from the Virgin River where the road ascended to Mormon Mesa at Virgin Hill, crossed the mesa to the Muddy River and its crossing at California Wash. This saved the longer route to Halfway Wash through the quicksands along the Virgin River. The later immigrants and the Mormon colonists of San Bernardino, in the early 1850s found a better route through Cajon Pass along a hogback in the western side of the Upper Cajon Pass overlooked by Baldy Mesa. At the same time along the Mormon Road were being seeded many of the Mormon settlements that developed into towns and cities of modern Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Southern California. Los Angeles – Salt Lake Road 1855–1905 By mid-1855 the Mormon Road had been improved and rerouted, to make it a military and commercial wagon road that ran between Salt Lake City, Utah and Los Angeles, California. In Cajon Pass the State of California paid to reroute the road from Coyote Canyon route to the Sanford Cutoff and made improvements to the route as far as the California border. In Utah Territory, the Federal government sent an engineer that built Leach's Cutoff between Cedar City and Mountain Meadow that shortened the route between Johnson Springs (now known as Enoch) and the meadow by , avoiding the longer route via Cedar Spring, Antelope Spring, Pyute Creek to Road Springs at the lower end of Mountain Meadow. The road was also rerouted between Cove Creek to the crossing of Beaver River at modern Beaver, upriver from