What Day 14 would have been like - Rye Patch SRA NV to Donner Memorial Park CA

Here’s what today, day 14 would have been like.

 

 

We would have had a chilly (high 20s) but pleasant night’s sleep at Rye Patch State Recreation Area in NV, just off I-80.   After breaking camp, we would have driven 10 miles down I-80, hugging the Humboldt River as close as we could, and taken a 16-mile round trip detour to visit the Humboldt Sink, where the river of the same name simply disappeared.

 

A lot of drama took place on this route in 1846, but was nothing compared to what was to come when the Donner Party reached the Sierras. Wolfinger was killed for his hoard of gold by Spitzer and Reinhart; Pike was killed in an accident; Hardcoop was thrown out by Keseberg (what did I tell you) and never seen again.  Eddy refused to help Breen pull his horse from the mud and the horse died.

 

Back on I-80, we would then be traveling through the Forty-Mile desert to just short of the suburbs of Reno.

 

In Reno, we would be setting the GPS for  4385 Loreto Lane where the Millcreek and Donner Springs subdivisions built in the 1980s set aside an acre of land to memorialize this spot (below) where the Donner’s camped on the Emigrant Trail  in then-Truckee Meadows before the final push to get to then-Truckee Lake to climb the 7,057- foot summit that would get them to Fort Sutter before the snows came.

 

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After a leisurely lunch in the bench-less park, much to the puzzlement of the residents as to why we were there (“Just wanted to give Donner a break,” I would have said, puzzling them even more) we would have hopped back into the Defender for the 27 mile drive in sunny 71-degree weather to Donner Memorial State Park in Truckee CA along the last of the rivers the Party would encounter, the Truckee

 

Before we arrived at Donner Memorial Park, we would have stopped at the Alder Creek Camp, six miles from Truckee, where the Donner’s were forced to stop after an axel broke on one of George owner’s wagons  He cut he hand trying to repair it, and that, as it turns out, was fatal.  It delayed the whole party from getting over now-Donner summit before the snows--- the biggest ever recorded there since, five feet---- hours before they attempted to cross over. Donner and I bivouacked just a couple of hundred yards from this camp back in 2018.

 

At Donner Memorial Park, our first visit would have been to the memorial statue there (below), depicting the hapless emigrants, not saluting, but shielding their eyes from the blinding sun  hitting the deep snow as they peered into the distance every day hoping to see a rescue party coming off the Sierras summit for them.  That help eventually came, but not soon enough for more than 40 of them.

 

 

Becasue reservations at Donner State Park for today were full two months ago, we had plans to camp at a park along Lake Tahoe, 20 miles to the south, but those reservations were cancelled because of the Caldor Fire.  There were a number of other camps near the Alder Creek Camp of the Donner’s we would have tried to camp in.  Or we would have bivouacked in the same site we cut back in 2018.

 

Donner at his eponymously named parked back in 2018:

On top of Donner summit overlooking Donner Lake with Donner in 2018