El Dorado National Forest: Carson Pass and the Mormon Corridor

Carson Pass sits at eight thousand five hundred seventy-three feet on Highway Eighty-Eight, the highest maintained highway crossing of the Sierra Nevada that is open year-round. The pass was used by Kit Carson in eighteen forty-four, when he guided John C. Fremont's mapping expedition over the Sierra. It became the primary emigrant route after the gold rush, before the Donner-Truckee corridor developed its own infrastructure. Between eighteen forty-seven and eighteen fifty-two, somewhere between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand Mormon emigrants crossed this pass heading west, then returned east after Brigham Young ordered the Mormon community back to Utah in eighteen fifty-seven. Carson Pass was a high-traffic corridor of American migration that most histories skip over in favor of the more dramatic Donner Pass story.

The El Dorado National Forest wraps around the south shore of Lake Tahoe and runs south along the Sierra crest to the Stanislaus National Forest boundary. It encompasses Carson Pass, the Mokelumne Wilderness, and the Desolation Wilderness, approximately five hundred seventy thousand acres of granite and glacially polished landscape that sees moderate visitation because it lies between the more famous Tahoe basin to the north and Yosemite to the south. That relative obscurity makes it, for the unhurried traveler, among the most accessible wilderness in the Sierra.

At the pass itself, a granite marker commemorates Fremont's crossing in February of eighteen forty-four. The snow at Carson Pass that winter was so deep that the expedition's animals began to die and Fremont ordered the group to kill and eat them. They made it over. Their notes described the Sierra Nevada in its winter state, which is a kind of beauty that requires some suffering to fully appreciate.