Donner Lake

Nicely captured!
bruce

Fabulous shot!

Admired in:
www.ipernity.com/group/tolerance

Thanks, everyone! The monument is indeed poignant, albeit the Donner party made _lots_ of dumb decisions.

Dumb... yes... hindsight is wonderful isnt it.. specially in the light of modern technology.

Maybe not so dumb at the time.

This place has many ghosts and is truly sad.

I have a friend with a cabin here.. and has had for many years. She says its not a "quiet" place to be often . Another friend hikes there every other year and is a very down to earth soul well used to wilderness and he hikes where others dont.. most of the year.... He finds the area uncomfortable at times.

Admired in ~ I ♥ Nature

The Donner party seems to have gotten themselves trapped into the same psychology of "never retreat" that's been the downfall of so many others before and since. If they'd backtracked a few miles down the Truckee River, the snowfall would have been considerably less and they could've fished the river. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to _stop_ pushing and back off.

And, of course, the whole area is really built up now. There are lots of what we ironically call HCAs ("Humble Country Abodes") around the lake and on the ridge to the north, not to mention around Truckee itself. And both I-80 and the transcontinental railroad go thru there. It's not exactly the wilderness experience!

Another thought: if there are ghosts, lots of them are probably Chinese workers killed under the appalling working conditions while building the railroad in the 1860s. It was one of the first construction projects to use high explosive (raw nitroglycerine(!)), and guess who was delegated to handle the nitro! A casual disregard for worker safety crossed with sheer racism...