Around these parts we tend to hear the name “Donner” and think we know the rest. But the truth is most of us don’t know the half of it. That’s where Donner Party Hike weekend, Oct. 4 and 5, comes in to fill us in on the details.
“There’s so much to the story,” says Alice Osborn, author, artist, and historian, whose album Skirts in the Snow consists entirely of music inspired by the Donner Party. “When people get out hiking on this weekend, it connects us to the folks from 179 years ago and beyond.”
The two-day event comprises interpretive hikes, talks, exploration, theater, and history you can feel. Most of the events take place on Donner Summit, which, for its thousands of years of Native American summertime inhabitation, the first wagon train crossings (including the namesake party), the transcontinental railroad, and even the first transcontinental highway and telephone line, Bill Oudegeest, President of the Donner Summit Historical Society, calls “the most historically significant square mile in California and maybe the entire Western United States.”
Saturday morning’s hikes will be guided by scholar-docents who live and breathe this stuff, regaling participants with era stories while also identifying flora, petroglyphs, and locales of emigrant significance. Opt for a leisurely stroll through the Van Norden Meadow on the Summit Valley or choose a more moderate venture with the 3-mile Summit Canyon or 2.5-mile historic Donner Pass hikes. To test your mettle, select from the strenuous Donner Peak/Coldstream Pass 4.5-mile out-and-back, the High Sierra Lakes 6-mile loop, or the 6-mile Roller Pass/Judah Loop hike.
All excursions start at 7,000 feet of elevation or higher and will forge ahead (within reason) in rain, sleet, or snow. Bring layered clothing, sturdy shoes, light snacks, and your own water.
Check out the Chautauqua
In addition to Saturday’s guided hikes, registered hikers will be provided lunch and presented with midday entertainment in the form of Chautauqua. What’s a Chautauqua, you ask?
Well, before there was TikTok and TV, there was radio. And before radio there were the Chautauquas — traveling troupes of actors putting on historically-themed entertainment in the form of plays, lectures, and concerts in which actors portrayed known characters and/or stories from the past. Chautauquas — a word of Iroquois origin and name of a lake in New York — rose to such distinct heights of cultural expression across our land that Theodore Roosevelt once termed them “the most American thing in America.”
And while Teddy could walk softly and carry a big stick, the aforementioned Osborn, in her own way, very much does too. A native North Carolinian who became intrigued with the Donner Party and Donner Summit in increasing increments over her life and now resides in Truckee (“There are no guardrails out here,” she notes. “We are on the edge of living, and I like that”), Osborn and her creative partner, Rick Mitchell, have written an original Chautauqua on the famous Reed family that will headline Saturday’s entertainment.
In hopes of a better life, James Reed took his family west on the California Trail and became the early leader of the Donner Party. But he infamously urged the group to take the untested “shortcut,” the Hastings Cutoff, that ultimately led them to becoming stranded in the Sierra. He also murdered a man, shanking him in the neck after a dispute on the trail and getting himself banished, forcing his wife and daughters to battle for survival without him.
The ladies’ courage and grit, which the play explores with a sort of visceral intimacy, is perhaps best illustrated by an attributable quote from the youngest of the Reed girls, Patty. “If you never see me again,” she told her mother one fateful day as she held her doll, Dolly, tight under her arm, “do your best.”
Following the play and rounding out the Chautauqua, Bob Crowly and Tim Tweetmyer of History Expeditions will give an interactive lecture on the success of the esteemed Stephen’s Party, part of the first successful wagon-crossing of the Sierra, to which much of early California owes a nod. (Learn more about what the fascinating History Expeditions does at historyexp.org.)
Sunday and Story
Activities continue Sunday morning at the Donner Camp Picnic Area north of Truckee on Highway 89 near Alder Creek, where the namesake family was forced to spend the winter after their wagon broke down, never making it with the rest of the group to the lake that now bears their name.
Guided tours of the site’s archaeological finds and surrounding areas will be given, and one will be led by Osborn herself.
As often happens when she speaks of the winter of 1846/47, Osborn’s voice takes on a heavy tone as she recounts the Donner family’s transport breaking down. “When the axle broke, Eliza, the youngest daughter, was trapped in the wagon. The wagon collapsed. It almost smothered her. It almost killed her.”
Osborn proceeds to espouse on how Eliza’s uncle was “barely able to rescue her,” and how the wood from the wagon was used to create the lean-tos under which the family spent their nights in winter’s unbearable cold.
It’s things like that you’ll get at the Donner Party Hike weekend. Not the myth that modern culture so carelessly tosses around, but the real stories about the real human beings — and the very real things they overcame to keep on breathing, one more day at a time.
For ticket registration and more information, visit donnerpartyhike.com.
