Following the Trail of the Donner Party Part 5 of 7: Crossing the Great Basin Desert

Welcome to Wonderhussy Adventure #387
Date of adventure: 7/17/19-7/20/19

Beginning in the 1840s, hundreds of thousands of people undertook the monumental overland journey to the American West -- mostly on foot, or in simple wooden wagons. And they weren't all mountain men or cowboys -- most were average men, women and children, looking for a better life. Say what you will about their motivations, treatment of Native peoples, and impact on the landscape -- these people were HARD CORE! Imagine walking 2,000 miles, dragging all your worldly possessions over deserts, across rivers and over the Rocky Mountains -- all without modern camping gear or GPS! It was rough...but also the adventure of a lifetime.  Join me as I drive the entire length of this route, following the footsteps of one of the first wagon trains to undertake this journey: the ill-fated Donner Party. These 84 people left the edge of "civilization" in Independence, Missouri in 1846...and thanks to a series of bad decisions and bad luck, ended up trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains, infamously resorting to cannibalism to survive the winter.  How did it happen? Let's find out!

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Credits:
Sierra Nevada Mts: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA - Storm Over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Reno, Nevada, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45449434
Hastings cutoff map: Kmusser - Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, Trails data from the NPS [1], all other features from the National Atlas., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9777193
Navajo Night by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Artist: http://audionautix.com/

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