The Donner Party Turns Up Broad Hollow

In the late summer of eighteen forty-six, a wagon train fought its way through these mountains, and the choices made near here would help doom it.

This was the Donner Party, lured onto an untested shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff that promised to save miles to California. Instead it cost them precious weeks. The Wasatch Mountains had no road. The emigrants had to hack one out of brush and willow, foot by foot.

Unable to force their way down Dixie Hollow, they turned right and climbed up Broad Hollow at this spot, hauling wagons over a bench and dropping into East Canyon beyond. Every lost day mattered. The delay here put them at the Sierra Nevada too late, and an early snow trapped them for a deadly winter. The Mormon pioneers who came a year later followed the very road the Donner Party had cut.