Their specific courses and distinctive histories are largely forgotten to most Americans today, except to a self-mocking fraternity of aficionados who call themselves "Rut Nuts." But when my family and I traveled through Wyoming and Nebraska last summer, we found that these ghost highways are readily rediscoverable, and will repay your effort with a measure of both exercise and education.

The four best-known trails – the Oregon, Mormon, California and Pony Express – run closely together across hundreds of miles of Nebraska and Wyoming, usually within a short distance of modern highways. Along the way are striking geological landmarks and moving reminders of the lives and deaths of the explorers and pioneers who opened up the West.

We began our exploration of the western trails in Casper, Wyoming, where the National Historic Trails Interpretative Center provides a child-friendly introduction to the Big Four Trails and the western migration in general. An 18-minute film in an expansive theater surrounded by life-sized dioramas of Western emigrants and wagons, together with well-designed charts and exhibits, got us up to speed on the basic details we needed to know.

The Oregon and California Trails each ran more than 2,000 miles, and the Mormon Trail over 1,300 miles, from starting points on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to their respective terminuses in Oregon’s Willamette and Columbia River Valleys, California’s Central Valley, and the basin of the Great Salt Lake. The trails’ heyday was surprisingly brief: barely 25 years between 1843 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, which transformed what had been an arduous and risky five- to six-month adventure by wagon into a safe and relatively comfortable week-long passage by train.

The California Trail was the most heavily used, with 350,000 emigrants scrambling west in the great Gold Rush of the late 1840's and thereafter, while the Oregon and Mormon Trails each witnessed the passage of 70,000-80,000 emigrants. And the passage was dangerous: perhaps as many as one out of ten travelers died along the way. Contrary to what old Hollywood westerns suggest, however, the primary threats came from disease (especially cholera) and accidents (including firearms mishaps, snakebites, and drownings at river crossings), rather than from hostile Indians.

Inspired by the exhibits we’d seen in the Interpretative Center and having some time in our afternoon schedule, we drove west along Wyoming Highway 220 to see two of the principal landmarks in the middle section of the western trails. The first of these, Independence Rock, is a huge hump of gray granite about 50 miles west of Casper that rises above the surrounding plain like a stranded whale.

Independence Rock was a key marker of a wagon train’s progress. A common view held that emigrant caravans bound for Oregon or California needed to reach the rock by no later than July 4th to be safely across the Rocky Mountains before the winter snows arrived. The rock also marked the spot where the trails entered the valley of the Sweetwater River, whose cold, clear water was a welcome change after a taxing fifty-mile passage across dry plains and alkali flats west of modern Casper.

Independence Rock was hard but carveable, and so many emigrants etched their names and dates of passage there that it became known as "the Register of the Desert." Time has worn away most of the names, although you can still see some inscriptions on its summit and along the rock’s lower flanks, especially at the southern end facing the Sweetwater River. The rock is a manageable climb with some steep stretches (take the trail leading to the left as you approach the rock from the parking area). The summit offers a commanding view of the surrounding plains and of Devil’s Gate, the next major emigrant landmark, five miles farther west.

At Devil’s Gate, the Sweetwater River has sliced a short but picturesque 300-foot-deep gorge through the sheer granite wall of the Rattlesnake Mountains. The four trails passed not through the bottom of the gorge, which the river largely fills, but across some low hills just to the south. This was another popular campsite, offering the pioneers the chance to scramble over the rocks or splash about in the stream.

You can get a distant and partial view of Devil’s Gate from a public overlook just north of Highway 220, but to actually visit the gorge itself, you need to stop a short distance further on at the Martin’s Cove Historic Site. Martin’s Cove commemorates a tragic chapter in the Mormons’ western migration. In 1856, a party of Mormon emigrants who were pulling their belongings in handcarts started late, encountered delays, and had barely passed Independence Rock when an early snowstorm caught them. They took shelter in a westward-facing mountain cove just north of the Sweetwater, but 145 persons – nearly half the company – died of cold and exposure before a rescue party from Salt Lake City reached the scene.

Today, the Mormon Church runs a well-organized museum at the site that presents the history of the Mormon migration and the Martin’s Cove debacle. Walking trails lead 2 miles west to Martin’s Cove and one-half mile east to Devil’s Gate. Docents addressed as "Brother" or "Sister" are available to answer your questions, and your children can try the experience of hauling – or, more likely, being hauled in – handcarts similar to those used by some companies of Mormon emigrants. (Young Mormons sometimes come to the site in nineteenth-century dress and haul the 150-pound handcarts out to Martin’s Cove as an act of religious devotion.)

After returning to Casper, our itinerary took us north along I-25 across the rolling hills and sharp ravines of the Powder River Basin and on to the eastern flanks of the Bighorn Mountains. South of the small but charming town of Buffalo, this route intersects with the short-lived, ill-fated Bozeman Trail, which was marked out in 1863 to connect the main immigrant routes along the north Platte with the recently discovered goldfields of Montana.

But the Bozeman Trail cut directly across some of the richest buffalo hunting grounds of the Plains Indians – lands that, moreover, had been promised to the tribes in perpetuity by the Fort Laramie Treaty only twelve years earlier. The result was five years of fierce and ultimately successful resistance to the EuroAmerican intrusion by the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, earning the Bozeman Trail the sobriquet "Bloody Bozeman" and resulting in its abandonment in 1868.

The Indian coalition won its most signal victory on a bitterly cold and snowy day in December 1866 along a line of bleak hills just two miles from an army outpost named Fort Phil Kearney. A group of Indian braves – including the young warrior Crazy Horse – successfully lured a detachment of 81 infantrymen and cavalrymen into an ambush from which not a single soldier escaped.

The Fetterman Fight, as this lesser-known precursor of Custer’s Last Stand is known, took place right on the Bozeman Trail, and you can still see the trail ruts crossing the shoulder of the small hillock where the doomed soldiers made their last stand. Although it offers expansive views, the site is not heavily visited, and the treeless hills have a lonely, mournful aspect. The only sounds are the steady whispering of the wind, the gurgle of a cattle watering channel, and the moaning of 18-wheelers laboring along Interstate 90 a couple of miles to the east.

After making a wide circuit east through South Dakota’s Black Hills and then south across the sandhills of the western Nebraska panhandle, we reconnected with the four main trails about ten days later near Bridgeport, Nebraska, a crossing point on the North Platte 210 miles below Casper.

For hundreds of miles across eastern and central Nebraska, the trails followed a monotonous and featureless course through the Platte River valley. But about 60 miles east of the boundary of Wyoming territory, the scenery abruptly changed. Here the delighted emigrants encountered a succession of picturesquely-shaped standstone-and-clay buttes, pinnacles, and bluffs rising from the plains. These were memorialized in many emigrants’ journals and sketchbooks, as well as on the canvases of nineteenth century artists such as William Henry Jackson and Alfred J. Miller.

We found the first of these geologic remnants – Courthouse and Jail Rocks – towering 400 feet above prairie grass and sagebrush five miles south of Bridgeport. Named for their supposed likenesses to the courthouses and nearby jails that occupied the centers of many eastern cities, this resemblance was questioned even by many of the pioneers. To me, Jail Rock instead suggested a giant and well-fed lioness contentedly surveying the plains at day’s end.

Fourteen miles farther west is Chimney Rock, perhaps the most famous landmark of the western trails: its silhouette still graces Nebraska’s state Welcome signs and car license plates. Chimney Rock is a sandstone-and-clay shaft that rises 120 feet above a pyramidal mound of earth some 200 feet high.

It was somewhat taller and may have more closely resembled a chimney in the mid-nineteenth century – today, it looks like a clenched first with a stubby thumb pointing skyward. This was another favorite site for carving "Kilroy was here" remembrances into the rock, but the stone was so soft that almost none of the pioneers’ inscriptions survive today.

Chimney Rock has a small interpretative center, but it had already closed when we got there around 6 p.m. There’s a parking area across a ravine from the rock, about a half-mile walk from the base of the mound. But a sign there warns against rattlesnakes in the brush, and the light was starting to fade. So we simply enjoyed the view of the rock and the wind rippling through the battalions of Black-Eyed Susans fringing the parking area, then moved on to the emigrants’ next great landmark – Scotts Bluff.

Named for an early Mountain Man who met an untimely death there in 1829, Scotts Bluff is the largest and most imposing of the procession of sandstone formations that distinguish this stretch of the North Platte. It actually consists two great bluffs, rising to a height of 760 feet, which are cut in half by Mitchell Pass. A winding auto drive proceeds through a series of tunnels to the top of the northern butte, crowned by ponderosa pines and Rocky Mountain junipers, or the more energetic can hike up a walking trail (1.6 miles) from the National Park Service Museum at its base.

However you reach the summit, you’ll be rewarded with a view of the town of Scottsbluff across the river; the line of sandstone formations stretching 20 miles back down the Platte valley to Chimney Rock, which is just visible in the distance; and the rolling country to the west that culminates in Laramie Peak, 100 miles away. Another half-mile-long trail leads from the Park Service Museum at the foot of the rock past a couple of replica wagons through Mitchell Pass, following the deep swale dug into the earth by the passage of the emigrant trains.

The Park Service Museum at Scotts Bluff is cramped and dated, with exhibits that must have been new in the 1950's. Nevertheless, it is informative and has a wealth of things to see. Not to be missed are the lively series of canvases of various Oregon Trail scenes – including Independence Rock, Chimney Rock, and Mitchell Pass – by William Henry Jackson, who worked as a drover along the trail in the 1860's before going on to become a famous photographer and artist of Western scenes in the 1880's and 1890's.

Although the routes of the western trails across the northern Great Plains are lined with at least 30,000 graves, practically all of them were unmarked. Most often, those who died were simply buried in the middle of the trail, and the wagons then rolled onward over the graves to obscure their traces, thereby hopefully preserving the burials from disturbance by curious Indians or wild animals.

One of the few graves that received a different treatment and whose location is well-marked today is located on the north side of the Platte, along the eastern fringes of the town of Scottsbluff. Just past where South Beltline Highway crosses the Burlington Northern Railroad tracks, there is a small but well-maintained park with a square enclosure that contains the remarkable grave of Rebecca Winters.

Rebecca Winters was an early convert to Mormonism who, with her husband and family, emigrated in several stages from New York to Iowa to escape religious persecution. In 1852, the Winters family decided to join the final exodus to Brigham Young’s New Zion in the Great Salt Lake basin.

While nearing Scotts Bluff on August 15, 1852, however, Rebecca died of cholera – a savagely quick killer that could bring mortality within hours of its initial onset. Her husband Hiram, assisted by a family friend, William Reynolds, gave extraordinary care to her interment. They dug a deep grave, wrapped her body in a blanket, placed it on a bed of planks taken from a shattered wagon, then covered it with a further layer of planks and several feet of earth. Finally, Reynolds took a metal wagon wheel rim and chiseled the words REBECCA WINTERS, AGE 50 into the band of the iron. He hammered that into the shape of a tombstone and stuck this into the earth to mark her grave.

Despite these extraordinary efforts, Rebecca’s grave site was forgotten nonetheless – until almost 50 years later, when surveyors laying out the route for the Burlington Northern Railroad found the neglected metal marker still standing in the long prairie grass. In 1995, the grave was relocated a short distance further away from the railway line so it would be safer to visit. It’s worth making the effort to stop by. Here, as nowhere else, we got a tangible sense of the sacrifice and sorrow that were an inseparable part of this great westward migration.

Next stop: Fort Laramie. It’s 28 miles west of the Wyoming state line, on the south side of the Platte, where the Laramie River flows north to meet the larger stream. Fort Laramie is well worth a visit, but you should forget your Hollywood images of a stockaded palisade with blockhouses at each corner. During its years as a U.S. Army military post, from 1849 to 1890, Fort Laramie consisted of a collection of unprotected buildings grouped around the perimeter of a huge square parade ground.

The buildings that survive today – some carefully restored, with nineteenth-century furnishings, and some in ruins – date from this 41-year period of U.S. military occupation. The white frame structure known as "Old Bedlam" – originally the Post Commandant’s house, and later the bachelor officers’ quarters – was erected in 1849 and is said to be the oldest standing frame structure in Wyoming.

But Fort Laramie’s richest history involves two earlier outposts dating back to the mid-1830's. No trace now remains of the original stockaded trading post established by William Sublette in 1834, but you can see what it looked like in a small watercolor by the Baltimore artist Alfred Jacob Miller. In 1841, the American Fur Company replaced Sublette’s ramshackle stockade with a more durable adobe-walled structure, which stood on the low bluff overlooking the Laramie River south of the parade ground of the later Army fort.

For twenty years between 1834 and 1854, whites and native Americans came together at these two frontier outposts in tolerance and mutual curiosity to exchange furs and buffalo robes for trade goods. During the 1840's and early 1850's, Fort Laramie became a commercial and social center for the various bands of Sioux – Brule, Minneconjou, Teton, Lakota – but Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Shoshones, Crows, and Pawnees came as well. In those days, the plain across the Laramie River was often filled with the camps of hundreds or even thousands of Indians. Missionaries came west to preach the gospel, and greenhorn tourists like the young Harvard brahmin Francis Parkman journeyed to Fort Laramie to commune with the Indians and notch up a few buffalo kills – experiences Parkman recounted in his 1849 best-seller, The Oregon Trail.

Once the mass western migration began in the late 1840's, however, this era of good feelings between whites and native Americans quickly came to an end. The emigrants brought smallpox and other previously unknown diseases and killed off or chased away much of the game that had once wandered freely across the Great Plains. The first armed clash between native Americans and the U.S. Army occurred near Fort Laramie in 1854, and the Fort remained the Army’s principal military base and headquarters on the northern plains until the Indian wars ended in 1890. Standing today on the windswept, lonely bluff overlooking the still-empty and evocative site of the Indian camps across the Laramie River, I found it impossible to avoid a feeling of melancholy recalling that brief era of amicability and openness between whites and the Plains Indians before everything went so terribly wrong.

Our final two landmarks, Register Cliff and the Guernsey trail ruts, were a dozen miles further west up Highway 26. The highway eventually turns left to cross the Platte, and then a right turn takes you to the Guernsey trail ruts, while a left turn down another side road brings you to Register Cliff. Both are well-signposted.

Deep Rut Hill at Guernsey is aptly named. Here the trails climbed a steep sandstone knob, and a quarter-century of iron-surfaced wagon wheels grinding up the hill gradually gouged out a trench in the rock that was deep enough in places to completely swallow my ten-year-old daughter. Today, this place where pioneers manhandled their heavily-laden wagons up the slope has been thoughtfully laid out with a paved pathway that makes it accessible to the wheelchair-bound.

Register Cliff, just around the corner from Deep Rut Hill, was our final stop. Like Independence Rock and Chimney Rock, this was another place where passing emigrants recorded their names, home towns, and dates of passage. But the westward-facing sandstone cliff here has preserved more names than have the other two sites, although it suffers from vandals and modern Kilroys making their own marks alongside their nineteenth-century predecessors.

We reached Register Cliff late in the afternoon, when the nearly flat beams of the fast-sinking sun illuminated the carved names with exquisite clarity. Here is "G. O. WILLARD Boston 1855"; there is "A. H. Unthank 1850" – just above his nephew "O.N. Unthank 1869" and even his great-grandson: "O.B. Unthank 1931." Although he couldn’t have known it, time was running out on Alva Unthank when he marked his passage on Register Cliff. Within a week, he died from a sudden attack of cholera. His grave (dated July 2, 1850) still survives near Glenrock, 90 miles farther up the Trail.

Our trip ended on a happier note when we turned in our rental car at the Casper Airport the next afternoon. In all, we had covered 270 miles along the route of the western trails – barely 15% of the total length of the Oregon and California Trails, but a section particularly rich in the trails’ most famous landmarks. And we had come away with an entirely new appreciation for the inspiring but also tragic history of America’s great western migration.

It’s never the easy destinations that leave the deepest mark when you travel. The places that stay with me the longest always require some measure of extra effort, whether it’s an arduous hike or scaling a fence or simply writing off for special permission weeks in advance of your trip. So as soon as I heard about the island of Skellig Michael while planning a first trip to Ireland with my wife, I was determined to get there. A forbidding pyramid of sandstone and slate eight miles out in the Atlantic off southwestern Ireland's Iveragh peninsula, often shrouded in fog and guarded by unpredictable seas, with a Dark Ages monastery that became a place of pilgrimage and penitence? All that, and thousands of puffins too? How could I possibly not go?

Skellig Michael figures in some of the misty legends associated with the earliest migrations to Ireland, but its real history begins with the coming of the first monks in the late sixth century. By that time, more than a century after St. Patrick’s death, Ireland was already dotted with monasteries. But some monks found life in a typical Irish religious house insufficiently rigorous. They sought greater solitude and privation by establishing new foundations in remote wastelands (often wishfully denominated as “Dyserts”) or on the islands dotting Ireland’s western coast. One such seeker was the shadowy St. Fionan, who with a handful of like-minded companions found in Skellig Michael the dysert par excellence.

For its first four or five centuries, the tiny monastery was known simply as “Skellig,” Gaelic for “the rock.” Occasional references to it pop up in monastic chronicles – we are told that in 823, Etgal of Skellig was carried off into captivity and starved to death by the Vikings. By the eleventh century, the monastery had been dedicated to the archangel St. Michael, who was often associated with religious shrines in rocky coastal venues.

Skellig Michael’s monastery was never a place of scholarship nor wealth. But the extreme privations voluntarily endured by its monks gained it a reputation for great holiness, and it became a place of pilgrimage as early as the tenth century. Sometime around 1200, however, a deterioration in the climate compelled the remaining monks to retire to a priory on the mainland at Ballinskelligs Bay. When that monastery was dissolved in 1578, the island passed into private hands.

In 1820, the “Great Skellig” was purchased by the predecessor agency of today’s Commissioners of Irish Lights, who constructed two lighthouses on the island’s southwestern side. The lighthouse men also built a quay at Blindman’s Cove and blasted out a road that hugs the cliffs along the island’s eastern flank. But the lot of those nineteenth century lighthouse keepers was in many respects little better than that of the medieval monks who preceded them. Several were blown or swept to their deaths over the island’s precipices, a hazard known as being “clifted.” And the mortality rate among the children of the lighthouse families seems to have been heartbreakingly high.

Today, there are a number of local boat captains in Portmagee, Knight’s Town, or Ballinskelligs who – weather permitting – can take you out to Skellig Michael. I selected Des Lavelle, who is something of a local legend. The son and grandson of Skellig lighthouse keepers, Des is a historian, naturalist, diver, and photographer. He has authored a short book about the Skelligs and was a guiding force behind the creation of the excellent museum about the islands – the Skellig Experience – that stands today on Valentia Island.

On the morning of our trip, we left the bed-and-breakfast where we were staying in Killarney and made the roughly 60-mile drive to Des’s embarkation point – the small fishing village of Portmagee – in just under ninety minutes. We parked opposite a massive, L-shaped concrete quay and soon spied Des’s boat starting to take aboard passengers at the end of it. His boat, the Beal Bocht, is a 30-foot motor launch with a small cabin and open sides that he also uses to host diving expeditions. The passengers numbered thirteen, including two other couples, a pair of young German women traveling together, and an American family with three children aged 6, 8 and 12. Surprisingly, Des advised me that relatively few Irish have much interest in making the trip out to Skellig Michael: today’s pilgrims are more likely to be German or American.

As we pulled from the quay out into the channel between Portmagee and Valentia Island, I thought it was refreshing that I hadn’t been asked to sign a lengthy waiver of all personal liability from any hazards that might befall me during this expedition. Nor had I been issued a ticket covered in fine print and disclaimers. Then it occurred to me that I also hadn’t been issued a life jacket, although Des had distributed oilskins to protect us from the sea spray. Looking curiously around the boat, I couldn’t see any indication that it even carried life jackets, although there was a huge automatically inflating life raft stored in a cylindrical capsule at the stern. I reflected that the tort liability revolution obviously hasn’t made it to Ireland yet.

We left Portmagee behind, its monochrome row houses of green, yellow, blue, red and white lining the quay beneath leaden skies. We passed Bray Head, the farthest point of Valentia Island, on our right side, and then the Deaf Rocks and Long Island, the last outriders of the mainland, on our left. And then we were out in the Atlantic, where the waves got progressively rougher as we moved farther away from land.

In most of the photographs I’d seen of Skellig Michael and its sister island of Little Skellig, they ride offshore like two vaguely threatening men-of-war. This morning, fog and mist initially obscured both islands. This didn’t matter much, for I was soon preoccupied with trying to keep myself and my camera equipment dry and with making sure that I didn’t get tossed out of the boat. Once the waves began breaking over the bow, the only relatively dry place was on the bench directly in back of the pilot’s cabin, and that choice spot had been snagged by some of the earlier arrivals.

Soon, all of us sitting on the boat’s side benches were drenched. Our pace was slow, for we sometimes wallowed heavily in the hollows between the swells. Still, I could see two more boats battling through the seas from other points on the mainland, heading in the same direction as we. It was comforting to know we weren’t completely alone.

Then it started to rain. Not lightly, either. I clutched the hood of my oilskins against the buffeting from the wind. No one was talking any more. Despite his father’s best efforts to shelter him, the young American boy across from us looked soaked and utterly miserable.

An hour into the crossing, Little Skellig suddenly appeared out of the mist. We pulled up on the sheltered side of the island, a raw and massy pile of dark slate and sharp pinnacles. “Let’s try and count the gannets,” Des suggested lightly, but his attempt at levity fell flat on our bedraggled company. After a moment or two, however, I roused myself to snap off a few photographs, because Little Skellig’s gannet colony is an unforgettable sight.

At first glance, the island appears covered in tufts of cotton, dotted every few feet along its rocky ledges. The white blobs are actually some 20,000-plus pairs of gannets, a goose-sized bird with a blue-grey bill, buff-colored head and nape, and black wingtips. Gannets look faintly insipid – they are a relative of the booby – but they are impressive aquatic hunters. They sail the skies around their island, searching for fish, and then plunge on their quarry in vertical dives of 100 feet or more. Several of the photos I took on Skellig Michael later that day show a gannet rocketing down in the background, its six-foot wings fully extended, its body a blur of motion.

After a pause for photographs, Des steered the boat around the northern end of Little Skellig. And then Skellig Michael loomed ahead of us at last.

By this time, it had stopped raining. This was just as well, because the landing point at Blind Man’s Cove is a challenge under the best of circumstances. There’s a small concrete quay with steep steps and a slimy rope to grab on to. Only one boat can land at a time, so several were hovering offshore. When our turn came, the boat was bobbing like a cork when we pulled aside the quay. Des and a couple of men from the Monuments Commission helped each of us scramble ashore.

My wife and I donned rain ponchos and then moved off along the muddy track of the lighthouse road. The road makes a sharp U-turn around the Cross Cove, a deep indentation of the sea whose ledges are host to a diverse collection of seabirds: puffins, gannets, kittiwakes (a species of gull), and guillemots. Turning another corner, just past the helicopter pad that the lighthouse men use to get to and from the island these days, we found the lower end of the South Stairs, which lead up to the monastery atop the island’s northeast peak.

The South Stairs, together with two other staircases that ascend to the monastery from other landing points along the island’s generally inhospitable shores, are one of the most remarkable legacies left behind by the medieval monks. In all, the three stairways include roughly 2,300 steps – some meticulously fitted from slabs of slate, some carved from solid rock. The South Stairs are said to number 544, or about two-thirds of the height of the Washington Monument. As we started the climb, scores of puffins bustled around and clucked at us, their faces bearing an aspect of sympathetic concern at these flightless giants who invaded their habitat for a few hours each day.

The climb was long, but the steps were well-spaced and I found it easier than I’d imagined. The principal problem was that the wind had now picked up again. Eventually, we reached the V-shaped notch known as Christ’s Saddle, a high valley separating the island’s two main peaks. Here, one little-used path snaked down the western side of the island to Blue Cove; another led off towards the island’s vertiginous South Peak, now barred to tourists; and a ladder-like staircase continued uphill to the monastery.

Clumps of visitors were clustered at the saddle, collecting themselves for the final ascent. The wind was shockingly intense, whipping in across the open ocean to the west. At this point my wife refused to continue, saying she was afraid of being blown over the island’s cliffs. Looking around, I saw that others were likewise sheltering beneath huge boulders, while the more determined members of their groups pushed on to make the final ascent to the monastery.

I let my wife take cover and pressed on. After climbing perhaps another 150 steps, the path suddenly flattened out and bent sharply to the left, and I found myself negotiating a terrace perhaps a dozen feet wide -- with an unprotected drop of several hundred feet off the cliff’s edge to my right. Then I passed through a short tunnel and found myself within the monastery complex.

Everything inside was veiled in mist. A staggered row of five hulking, dome-shaped clochans or beehive huts fronted on a paved stone terrace overlooking a precipice. Each was roughly fifteen feet high and constructed of thousands of unmortared stones, skillfully fitted so that each course of masonry tapered slightly upward until the whole structure could be sealed at the top with a single capstone. A single low door gave access to each hut.

I crawled inside the first and largest of the clochans. The paved stone floor was dry, and the air temperature was noticeably warmer than that outside on the terrace. The three-foot thick lower walls sealed out every breath of wind except that which drifted in through the door. The clochans were probably even more cozy in the days of their prime, because the monks seem to have covered the sides and top of the huts with layers of sod, held in place by protruding stone supports.

And those Dark Ages monks not only built well; they chose their site shrewdly. A fifty-foot curtain of rock that rises behind the row of clochans shelters the monastery terrace from the prevailing easterly winds sweeping across the Atlantic. This creates a microclimate of calmer, warmer air around the monastery that made the lot of the monks somewhat more endurable.

Not that their lives weren’t hard. During its Dark Ages prime, Skellig Michael must have been to houses of penitence what Devil’s Island was to penal colonies. The appalling weather was only half of it. The island has no natural springs or wells, so the monks carved cisterns carved to collect and store rainwater for drinking. There was little land for farming, although the monks may have been able to grow some vegetables on a few terraces carefully built up around the shoulders of the island’s two peaks. Grain for bread had to be brought from the mainland. Fish could be taken from the sea and birds and eggs from the land, but the latter were available only from mid-spring through mid-autumn. The other six months of the year must have been a grinding and debilitating struggle for survival.

After inspecting the clochans, I looked over the rest of the monastery terrace. There are also two small windowless chapels, shaped like upturned lifeboats, a few of the square stone altars known as leachts, and an oval enclosure tightly packed with the weathered grave markers of long-dead monks. But the most moving sight in the monastery complex is found in the ruins of the later medieval church. It contains the tomb of two small children of one of the lighthouse keepers, who died only a year apart in the late 1860's. Their gravestone suggests that the privations and losses endured by the lighthouse keepers were in some respects even harder to bear than those of the monks.

By now fog was sweeping in to envelop the peak, and I knew it was time to go. I rejoined my wife at the saddle and we made our way back to the Cross Cove, where we shared a picnic lunch and sheltered from the rain beneath some cane matting that covered the lighthouse road at that point. (Later, we learned that this was intended as a protection against the rockfalls that periodically slide down the northeastern peak.) As 2:00 approached, we rejoined our fellow travelers and jumped back aboard Des’s boat at Blindman’s Cove.

The seas were running higher on the trip back, but now they were lifting up our stern and pushing us ahead, rather than breaking over the bow. Des let the 6-year-old, whom I had last seen scampering happily amidst the monastery ruins with his father, take a turn at the wheel. All of us felt relieved, even exhilarated. We laughingly agreed with our fellow passengers that Skellig Michael practically defined the “once-in-a-lifetime experience”: something well worth doing once, but you’d have to be crazy to ever do it again.

Later, however, after I dried my hair, cleaned the mud from my shoes, and warmed myself with an Irish coffee and a bowl of hot chowder at the Moorings pub fronting on the quay, I began to feel differently. By the time we drove out of Portmagee that day, I felt that I would be willing to return to Skellig Michael – at least if the sea was calm and the weather was sunny. One can always dream . . . .