Donner Pass

Yesterday we went to Truckee, CA and to Donner State Memorial Park. Truckee was a neat little town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains complete with an old downtown full of shops and restaurants. Donner Pass is a memorial site to the Donner Party and to the many groups of people that traveled cross-country to California in the early days of the United States.
The Donner party is famous because due to some bad choices and not having experienced guides, they made it to the pass through the Sierra Nevada mountains at wintertime. A little history- the settlers in this group left in 1846 for CA and decided to take the "Hastings cutoff" to their demise- this was a published route through Utah and the Sierra Nevada mountains that was supposed to be much faster and at least 300 miles shorter than the route to CA taken most frequently. Different leaders of what was to become the Donner Party were given advice against taking this short-cut because it was very difficult and very few had even used it. They were also told that it would be impossible to take their wagons this way. In Wyoming, half of the caravan went north on the "safer route," and the other half ventured toward Donner Pass to take the faster route. Once these people actually got across the Utah desert, they knew that they did not have enough supplies to make it to CA... their oxen had died and they had to leave most of their wagons behind in the desert.
The route eventually became impassable because there was 22 feet of snow on the ground and the group of people could not make it through. This spot is known today as "Donner Pass." They had to set up camp for 6 months before they could be rescued. While stranded, other groups tried to come and rescue them but were stalled by all of the snow. Once they were rescued, only 42 of the original 90 settlers were alive. Due to a food shortage, many of the survivors had resorted to cannibalism- but this is controversial.
At the park, we walked around on some of the hiking trails- one goes along the lake shore of Donner Lake. We also looked at the monuments to the Donner Party which stood in the places where their cabins or tent sites were at one time. The park was pretty, and the stories were interesting.