Donner Lake: The Winter Before and After

This is Donner Lake. It is a mile and a half long and half a mile wide. It sits at five thousand nine hundred thirty-six feet. In October, the water is cold in the way that high-elevation Sierra Nevada lakes are cold, which is to say: deeply cold, cold that does not negotiate.

The Donner Party arrived at the eastern shore of this lake in late October of eighteen forty-six. They had fallen weeks behind their schedule, in part because of a route shortcut that turned out to be neither short nor a cut. The first snows came almost immediately. By early November the pass above them, the same pass you have just come through or are about to reach, was closed under snow they could not cross.

They called it Truckee Lake. Not after the Donner family. After the Paiute guide who had shown them the route into the Sierra Nevada. His name was Truckee. The lake that became famous for the disaster named for a German immigrant family was originally named by those immigrants for an Indigenous man who had guided them to it.

The name Donner Lake was fixed in writing by McGlashan's eighteen seventy-nine history and by the mapmakers who followed. Truckee Lake stopped appearing on maps. The Paiute guide's name survived only in the town down the road.

The lake you are looking at is still beautiful, in the way the Sierra Nevada is always beautiful even when the story attached to it is terrible. The emigrants who camped on that eastern shore knew that too. They camped here for five months, which is a long time to look at a beautiful place and know you are not leaving it.