Franklin Graves and Charles Stanton were the only men in the company who knew about snowshoes. Now that they knew the miles of snow everyone would have to travel over on the west side of the pass, the men started to make snowshoes for the next attempt.

At the end of November, the snow was gone at the east end of Donner Lake and communication had been established between the lake group (Breen, et al) and the emigrants at the Alder Creek camp site five miles away. The news at Alder Creek was not good. George Donner's gashed hand was not healing and his brother Jacob was ill. Neither of them would be able to make a trans-Sierra trek anytime soon.

Thanksgiving Day 1846
On the 25th, the pioneers chose November 26 (Thanksgiving Day) to try to escape on snowshoes. Meanwhile, unknown to them, a storm was rapidly pushing towards the mountains from the Pacific. Patrick Breen wrote: "Cloudy and looks like the eve of a snowstorm. Our mountaineers intend trying to cross the Mountain tomorrow if fair. Froze hard last night."

That night the storm moved in, just in time to thwart the escape attempt. The next morning, Breen wrote in his diary: "Began to snow yesterday in the evening, now rains or sleet. The mountaineers don't start today. Wind about west, wet and muddy."

The storm at the end of November killed any chance for a quick escape over the mountains. As the snow level dropped, the white stuff began piling up at the two camps. Dark clouds obscured the pass itself, but the emigrants knew the drifts must be getting deeper by the day.

Food
Most of the families and all of the hired teamsters, including those at the camp at Alder Creek, were short of food supplies. The lucky pioneers with cows or oxen began butchering the meat to store it in the snow. The scrawny cattle and draft animals weren't needed anymore because at this point there was no way to get a wagon over the pass, and without grass, the oxen wouldn't survive much longer on their diet of pine boughs. The Breen family had managed to protect its livestock from the Indians better than anyone else, but even if the Breen's hoarded their food and didn't share with the others, the stockpile would not last the winter.

California Weather
Stuck in the Sierra, the Donner party could not know about the mild weather along the coast and in the valleys below them. For nearly two weeks during the middle of November, the San Francisco area had enjoyed mostly sunny skies and temperatures in the 50s along the water, and it was even warmer inland. Moderate to fresh winds from the northeast and northwest kept the damp fog bank offshore.

During its journey from Monterey to San Francisco Bay, the U.S. warship Portsmouth struggled against gusty northeast winds, which delayed the ship's arrival at Sausalito. When the ship finally anchored, Dr. Marius Duvall, a naval surgeon, wrote: "The appearance of the land around the Bay is much improved since June last when the Portsmouth came in. The recent rains have caused the grass to spring up, which gives everything the refreshing greenness of our spring at home. The weather is fine and warmer now than we found it in the summer."

For a couple of weeks, mid-month, mild weather had blessed the region, but during the last week of November the storms got going again and successively colder Pacific weather fronts began to batter northern California. Each storm dropped snow levels in the mountains to lower and lower elevations. By December 1, the snow at Donner Lake was nearly six feet deep. Dry wood was increasingly hard to scavenge and simply getting around was difficult.

November 1846
Two extended storm periods, one at the beginning of the month, and one at the end, characterized the weather faced by the pioneers. In the lower elevations of the Sacramento Valley, rain saturated the ground and caused minor flooding. In the mountains, an estimated six feet of snow fell on Donner Pass during the first storm period, which effectively closed the (Donner) pass for good. The colder storms at the end of the month piled snow up to six feet deep at Donner Lake, 1,000 feet lower than the pass, an unusual occurrence for so early in the season. The Donner Party of 81 people had missed, by about two weeks, its chance to get to California like the other pioneers who took the trail west in 1846.

The snowbound Donner party now had plenty of time to re-read land promoter Lansford Hastings' book about their adopted state and his shortcut for getting there. Maybe they found the one obscure statement about California's climate that he got right: "It may be truly said of this country, that December is as pleasant as May. The remarks here made, in reference to the mildness and uniformity of the climate, are applicable only to the valleys and plains, for the mountains present one eternal winter."

Editor's Note: The photos are by the author. This installment is #22 in an exclusive, weekly series tracing the actual experiences of the Donner Party as it worked its way into American history. Mark McLaughlin, weather historian, who lives on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, wrote the series for Tahoetopia.