All the Donner party had to do was to cross one more hill of about 1000 feet elevation differential (the hill on which Boreal Ridge ski resort is presently located), and they would have found the headwaters of the Yuba River, and a path down to the valley.

Such is the lot of trailblazers.

I wonder of the story of the Donner Party has significance in today's political climate, about blazing trails and the consequences of quitting even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

That back road to Donner looks righteous - didn't know it existed. Have you ever ridden old US-40 over the hill?

Highway 40 is the back road. You can take it all the way down through the little town of donner lake and up the sheer granite cliffs that lock the valley up to the west and all the way down to cisco grove where the road is mostly covered by Highway 80. From Donner eastward, the best thing to do is to go up Highway 89 to Henness pass road. From there you can connect to Dog Valley Road which will take you over into Nevada and into Verdi. That approximates the path of the '46 emigrant trail, in fact there are several markers along that path to point out the route, and there are still some visible wagon "ruts" in that area. Its passable by car, and doesnt require any special equipment (in summer of course!). One of my other adventures with this route in the past involved taking a mountain bike over this route to get from Nevada to Sacramento by Bicycle. It works, but it was a lot of work. To get to Nevada City by bike, you have to avoid Highway 80, so theres a bit of backtrack along Jackson Meadows lake to the north of Donner, which leaves you at lake spaulding and highway 20, which is the back route into Nevada City. Once you make it to nevada city, you can go down highway 49 or Highway 20 to get into the valley.

Following the emigrant route makes you very aware of things that we dont think of in the modern age, like the grade of the road. Animal power limits you as to what you can climb and under what conditions. If you follow the route I described, the first things you notice is that despite climbing out of the mountains, its actually fairly flat, which is the whole idea. In the age of machinery, we dont think anything at all of a hill or two. The Emigrants didnt look at it that way. For the Donners, exhausted after the hell of crossing the Nevada desert, they were in no shape to cross the ridgeline that is behind the lake, which is the actual path for their 1846 trail, the area that highway 80 now covered didnt come into use until 1960. The lake trail also requires the use of "rollers" or tree trunks with pulleys to keep the wagons together on the very narrow pathway. So if you take a group of very tired and exhausted people, put at the end of their physical endurance and dump 4 feet of snow on them at the bottom of the valley and block the pass, you get a very different decision tree than what you and I would take. The longer they waited, the less likely it was that they could get out. They probably could have walked out had they been thinking that a disaster was coming, but like most emergencies, they didnt think it was really that bad until it was too late to change anything. Their situation was so bad they could not even manage the smaller effort to go backwards to Truckee Meadows (Modern Reno) .

Remember, these were older men, Women and Children who had been walking every day since April from Missouri. You stand at the bottom of Donner and look up at that granite wall today and it just sucks the life out of you, you just cant imagine what it must've been like for them.

Remember that some did try to walk out in January, and several died in the effort and only a few survived naked and starving to make it into Johnson Ranch ( near modern day Beale AFB).

Seems like more than a few situations where indecisive, emotionally spent people in influential roles who spend time trying to hold on to what they have by forging consensus wind up getting eaten by those a bit more focused on themselves. Pretty good analogy for many of the current issues wouldn't you say?
Almost always best to slog on by trying to overcome the hurdles in front of you or die trying.
Pretty good Memorial Day reminder and the bike ride sounded good as well.
Now its off to make the daily long pi.... err, bread.