BAKER CITY, Ore. -- With Victorian-era buildings nearly uninterrupted along the city's expansive Main Street -- wide enough for a mule team to turn around -- Baker City makes a modern visitor feel like a time traveler.

More than 100 Baker City buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places and Baker City is just seven miles from the Bureau of Land Management's National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, where visitors can still walk the same path as the Pacific Northwest's pioneers.

Although the Oregon Trail runs near Baker City, it does not go through the town, which was built during the gold rush of the 1860s and during a second, 20-year mining boom from 1890 to 1910, well after the Oregon Trail's 1840-60 heyday. Discoveries from the gold rush are on permanent display at the U.S. Bank on Main Street, where a five-pound gold nugget shines in a glass case.

Nicknamed variously Queen City of the Mines and Queen City of the Inland Empire, Baker City became one of the largest outposts between Salt Lake City and Spokane, Wash. (Baker City is a two-hour drive from Boise, Idaho, and five hours from Portland.)

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IF YOU GO
Baker City and the Oregon Trail

• Getting there: Baker City is a two-hour drive from Boise, Idaho, but five hours from Portland, so plan accordingly. Amtrak no longer serves the town.
• Where to stay: A few budget motels and bed and breakfast establishments can also be found in Baker City, but The Geiser Grand is the place to stay if you're looking for history and distinctive architecture. The least expensive rooms cost from $79 to $109 per night with the Cupola Suite running $219-$249 per night. Reservations at GeiserGrand.com or by calling 1-888-434-7374.
• Attractions: Historic Baker City: www.historicbakercity.com or 1-800-523-1235.
• Baker Heritage Museum: Open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. daily in the summer. Admission: $6 adults; $5 seniors 60+ and youth 13-17; children 12 and under: free. www.bakerheritagemuseum.com or 1-541-523-9308.
• National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center: Open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. daily in the summer. Admission: $8 adults, $4.50 seniors, children 15 and under: free. www.blm.gov/or/oregontrail or 1-541-523-1843.
• Additional nearby attractions: Short trips out of Baker City can lead visitors to what's left in nearby ghost towns (www.visitbaker.com) or for a ride on the Sumpter Valley Railway (www.svry.com).
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With gold flowing freely, opulence followed, including the arrival of a saltwater aquarium to hold live lobsters imported from Maine in the 1890s.

As the decades passed, mining gave way to ranching and efforts to update the cityscape resulted in the erection of aluminum storefronts that hid the history beneath. These facades may have been ugly, but they also protected the historic buildings. By the 1970s, Baker City had fallen on hard times.

"People walked out and closed the door," said Ann Mehaffy, director of Historic Baker City Inc., a nonprofit revitalization program. "They didn't have the will or the money to tear down old buildings and build new ones. That was a huge advantage in the end."

Baker City's historic district was nominated to the National Register in 1978 and efforts to revitalize the city core took off in the 1990s with a strategic plan to preserve and promote the city's historic buildings, unearthed from their mid-century makeovers.

"If there's one thing you're going to do, go explore the historic district," suggests Barbara Sidway, co-owner with her husband, Dwight, of the Geiser Grand Hotel. "It's the most intact, 19th-century streetscape in the American West and there are friendly shopkeepers who will welcome you in their doors. It's like a museum that's always open and it charges no fee."

The historic district includes a 1909 Carnegie Library (now home to Crossroads Art Center), the 1908 St. Francis Cathedral and several Victorian private homes. Nearby there's also a natatorium that's been converted from an indoor pool into the Baker Heritage Museum with a second-floor ballroom that brings to mind the Grand Ballroom at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum in Oakland.

But the Geiser Grand is indisputably the city's iconic building. Designed in an Italianate Renaissance Revival style by architect John Benes, the 1889 building was home to the third elevator west of the Mississippi.

Originally housing a birdcage-style elevator, the elevator shaft had windows between floors that have since been covered with mirrors.

"There were openings because a woman couldn't be in an enclosed spot with a man and not lose her dignity," explained Denny Grosse, a Geiser Grand tour guide dressed in period-appropriate attire. "We didn't think that was very important anymore, so we closed them up."

Mrs. Grosse, a spry 80-year-old, gives hotel tours on Saturday afternoon (free to guests, $2 for other visitors). At the start of the tour she pointed out the clocks in the building's iconic cupola.

"The original clocks were wind-up, not electric, and were backlit by gas. In 1889 there were no streetlights so that was the brightest spot in the night sky," she said. "Cowboys and miners would come into town, get all liquored up and shoot out the clocks."

After replacing the clocks multiple times, the hotel's owner replaced them with large lion heads. Those were also used for target practice. One wounded lion head, with a gunshot through an eyebrow, hangs in the hotel bar today.

The hotel's first floor includes a dining room in the Palm Court, which sits beneath a stained glass ceiling that was re-created as part of the hotel's 1993-98 restoration that re-started the business after the building sat empty for 25 years. The Geiser ceased operations as a hotel in 1968 after the cast of the movie "Paint Your Wagon" stayed there during the film's production in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest an hour outside of town.

Before the $7 million upgrade, the Geiser was a mess. For the first two years, Mrs. Sidway wasn't sure the building could be saved. Its foundation is made of Tuff rock, which disintegrates when wet, and the hotel was essentially sitting in a giant puddle when Mrs. Sidway and her husband saved the building from threats of demolition.

The 30-room hotel is said to be haunted and its history is included in the book "Ghost Stories of Oregon" by Susan Smitten, which describes hotel guests hearing the voices of people talking and laughing and a lady in blue who has been seen walking up and down the grand staircase.

This past New Year's Eve, a Japanese television show made a return visit to "the haunted hotel" for a live broadcast. (A clip on the hotel's website shows scenes from the Japanese television show "Unbelievable".)

The hotel offers $50 ghost tours once a month led by Boise ghost hunters.

"I'm a skeptic," Mrs. Grosse said. "Supposedly they find ghosts but the tours are between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. and there's not a ghost I'd give up my sleep for."

It's not difficult to imagine ghosts on the windswept prairie outside Baker City. The valley is surrounded by mountains that were still snow-capped in late April during a walk in the ruts of history at the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. There, visitors get a sense of the journeys made by pioneers who made the trip from Missouri to the West Coast.

Kelly Burns, a park ranger, said the center's entrance hallway is intended to simulate walking down the Oregon Trail. Visitors walk between wagon trains as voices ring out from speakers, reading diary entries from pioneers who wrote about the dangers they faced on the journey.

One of the simplest displays is the most evocative: Visitors are asked to pack a toy-sized wagon full of supplies, a nearly impossible task that results in leaving some items behind, something that happened to those who made the 2,000-mile, five-month journey.

"I have had grown folks have serious discussions about whether to get rid of grandma's linens or the gun powder," Ms. Burns said. "The object of the game is you have to make a decision about what you must leave behind. People are always trying to get everything in because that's our life today but we're trying to get across the concept that back then it was different."

Ms. Burns said it takes visitors several hours to work their way through the center if they read every placard about life on the Oregon trail, settling the area, gold mining, land management and American Indian tribes.

"We have a few artifacts and a few reproduction artifacts but it's an interpretive center rather than a museum," she said. "It's artifact-light and interpretive-heavy."

That included a presentation by Dave Noble, 67, who was dressed as a mountain man in a typical 1834 outfit -- except for the cell phone hidden inside a pouch that dangled from his belt.

Mr. Noble explained common misconceptions about the Oregon Trail experience: That wagons were pulled by horses, that pioneers rode in the wagons and that Indians attacked every wagon train.

"The wagons were pulled by mule and oxen," he said, noting that horses that attempted the trail often starved to death. "Oxen are bovine, they have four stomachs, and they do well on prairie grass. The other thing about oxen is they travel at 2 mph and if you head out on a walk, you'll walk about 2 mph. It's really easy to keep up with them. A horse walks at about 5 mph, so you'd have to jog to keep up."

Mr. Noble said riding in wagons was not much of an option except for the sick and injured or the smallest children. Most settlers walked with the wagon train.

"The wagons had 1,500 pounds of supplies -- a plow, the bed, the stove, whatever else mom wanted. I read a diary of one lady who even brought her piano. It didn't make it," he said. "They left it in Nebraska."

The wagons had no suspension and there was always the danger that a rider could be injured or killed if heavy supplies shifted and fell.

"Everybody over the age of 6 was expected to walk," Mr. Noble said. "The only way someone rode in a wagon was if they were really young or infirm. Then they'd separate out the supplies into another wagon and make a bed in one wagon for everyone who needed to ride."

Indian attacks were rare, especially between 1843 and 1858 when the Indians were helpful guides for the pioneers.

"Along about 1858, a light popped on and they said, 'These guys have been lying to us. They are not crossing our land, they're stopping. They said they wouldn't kill our animals or deer and they are killing them.' So, yeah, then things began to happen," Mr. Noble said. "They did not attack every wagon train but they did attack several."

In addition to various interpreter presentations -- "Our Pioneer Ancestors," "Original Meals on Wheels" and "Finding Your Ancestors on the Oregon Trail" in May -- the center also hosts pioneer wagon encampments Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends with costumed re-enactors who demonstrate pioneer crafts and prepare food in dutch ovens using recipes of the era.

Perhaps nothing puts a visitor in a pioneering mind frame more than a hike on the Oregon Trail itself. The path is still visible beneath the ridge where the Interpretive Center sits. Paved paths from the center lead down to the ruts and accompanying swale, which are also accessible from nearby Highway 86.

It may be impossible to duplicate the experience of those West Coast settlers, but walking the dusty trail on a windy late April day after time spent at the center, it wasn't difficult to get at least a sense of the long, arduous journey it must have been.