Donner Pass

 I just got back from 3 weeks working for the census in California.  Most of that time I was in the Lake Tahoe area which was very pretty, but I also spent some time in Roseville and in the little communities around Donner Pass.

What a spectacularly beautiful area!  My favorite places are in the mountains with lakes and pine trees!

While I loved the scenery, I did not like driving over that pass  (elevation 7227 feet) and I made that drive 4 times.  Two of those times were on a Sunday afternoon when lots of people were driving back to central California from their lake vacations, pulling boats and campers and trailers but still zipping along at 75 miles per hour.  Add to that the semi trucks and it made me very nervous.  

I stopped feeling sorry for myself when I thought of the ill-fated Donner Party that I had heard about in history classes for many years.

When I reviewed the story I learned that about 60 people were trapped by an early snow at Donner Lake about 3 miles from the summit.   That is the lake you can see in the earlier photo.  Of those there were 19 men, 12 women and the rest were children, 6 of whom were babies or toddlers.  Many of these people starved to death or died of exposure.  Winters here are particularly harsh.  One man I talked to said that a couple of years ago they got 7 1/2 feet of snow in one 4 day storm.  Some house have ladders up to their 2nd floor windows to use when snow covers their doors.  

I don't even like to think about what it would be like to be living in make-shift log houses with no food during one of those storms.  We all have heard the stories of cannibalism and shuddered.  I like this historian's thoughts on the matter. 

 Historian Ethan Rarick wrote, "more than the gleaming heroism or sullied villainy, the Donner Party is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous"