A month earlier all of them had likely been in far better than average physical condition. Most of them were young. Their systems were by now acclimated to the 5,936-foot elevation of the lake camp. They had for the most part walked all the way from the Missouri River, climbed over the Wasatch, cut brush, toted water, and chopped firewood for weeks on end. If they had been well nourished, their aerobic capacity should have been nearly optimal. But they were far from optimally fit. Their meager diets had by now begun to erode both their muscle mass and the capacity of their lungs.
The powdery snow and steepness of the climb made every step harder than they might have expected when they set out. The snow deepened toward the summit. Even with their snowshoes, the men in particular found themselves sinking deeply with each step. Sarah and the four other women—of whom twenty-three-year-old Amanda McCutchen was the oldest—moved out in front. Because they were lighter, the women were better able to tackle the powder and beat down a path. The men began to follow in their footsteps.
By early afternoon they were high among the cliffs, scrabbling for footholds and handholds now as they worked their way up the ever-steeper route. The bright sun bore down on them through a relatively thin atmosphere at nearly seven thousand feet, and the reflection of the sunlight off of snow and rock and ice began to take an additional toll on their bodies. Charles Stanton, in particular, began to feel the effects of snow blindness.
All of them were also likely suffering in another way from the effects of the sun. Thus far they had managed to stay dry enough and warm enough to avoid what inevitably would be the greatest danger they would face in their quest to escape the mountains—hypothermia. But as they struggled up the mountain wearing layers of heavy, dark wool, the glacier-polished granite, ice, and snow began to reflect the sun’s heat from every surface, and their bodies increasingly had to labor to ward off hypothermia’s opposite—hyperthermia.
Ordinarily the human body is quite adept at maintaining a steady core temperature very near 98 degrees Fahrenheit. When our core temperatures begin to vary even by a degree or two from this fixed point, our bodies take measures to return themselves to a state of thermal homeostasis, a normal temperature. When we get too cold, for instance, we shiver as the body vibrates small muscles around vital organs in order to burn calories and generate warmth. Goose bumps rise on the skin in an effort (mostly vain in our case) to fluff up our primordial fur and provide an insulating layer of air above our skin. When we get too warm, on the other hand, we sweat so that evaporation can cool the surface of the skin, carrying heat away from the core of the body. But the margins for error are narrow. Hyperthermia begins to set in when core body temperatures rise above 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Brain death begins at 106 degrees. Conversely, hypothermia begins when core body temperatures sink below 95 degrees. Death occurs at 86 degrees. So whether the outside temperature is 110 degrees as we trek across the salt flats of Utah or 10 degrees as we sleep in the snow on Donner Pass, our bodies must maintain their inner workings within about a 6-degree range if we are to remain reasonably functional, and within a 20-degree range if we are to remain alive.*
In a 1982 experiment conducted on climbers ascending Alaska’s Mount Denali and documented in the PBS television show Deadly Ascent, Dr. Peter Hackett discovered that even well-conditioned alpine climbers sometimes experience dangerous fluctuations of internal body temperatures. Using data transmitted by NASA-designed radio-thermometer capsules that each climber swallowed, he found that the exertion of climbing on sunny slopes while dressed in clothing designed to retain body heat could cause core temperatures to soar rapidly into the hyperthermic range. Even more troubling, he found that those same climbers’ core temperatures could plunge just as rapidly into the hypothermic range when they stopped climbing and sat down on snow or cold rock. Aside from the direct dangers posed by hyperthermia and hypothermia, Hackett’s study suggests that the temperature fluctuations that occur within the bodies of climbers place enormous physiological stresses on the body as it struggles mightily to return itself to the state of thermal homeostasis on which it depends for survival. This additional stress, added to all the other stresses of climbing—the thin air, the extreme exertion, the unrelenting need for concentration, the glare of the sun, the threat of frostbite, and so on—is sometimes what pushes climbers’ bodies over the edge, into a kind of death spiral.
As Sarah and Jay struggled up the face of what would eventually be called Donner Pass on December 17, 1846, they knew nothing of hypothermia or hyperthermia. But under all the layers of sweat-soaked wool in which they were swaddled, their bodies were already fighting a silent, internal war between death by fire and death by ice, swinging back and forth between thermal extremes in a way that threatened to destabilize their regulatory systems and their bodies’ precious reserves.
By late afternoon they had scaled the pass and stood near the eastern end of the long valley in which Sutter’s mules had become bogged down back on November 22. There—despite their exhaustion and the desperate situation in which they found themselves—a few of them paused for a few moments to take in the grandeur of the scenery. A cluster of snowcapped peaks lay just to the southwest. To the north stood the massive basalt buttresses of 9,104-foot-tall Castle Peak. The sky overhead was a pale, translucent blue. The darker blue of the lake glinted far below them like a polished oval of lapis lazuli. Someone commented that they were about as near to heaven as they could get. Mary Ann Graves stopped to watch her companions move out in front of her and took note of her surroundings: “The scenery was too grand for me to pass without notice…. Being a little in the rear of the party, I had a chance to observe the company ahead, trudging along with packs on their backs. It reminded me of some Norwegian fur company among the icebergs.” Not everyone was taking in the sights, though. Most of the others simply pushed doggedly on ahead, heads down, taking one heavy, awkward step at a time.
None of them moved far beyond the pass that day, though. The hours were too short, the snow too heavy, their bodies too exhausted. Just west of the summit, they once again built a fire on a platform of logs, chewed their meager rations of beef, and fell asleep on the snow. Despite their exertions they had traveled only about three miles from the previous night’s camp.
The third day, December 18, once again dawned clear and cold. They slogged the length of the valley, through deep powder. When they left the valley behind, they moved southwest, skirting a high granite peak and then descending very slowly toward a cluster of frozen lakes. The sun remained bright, the snow a brilliant white, and the temperatures moderate through the morning, but in the afternoon the sky clouded up and snow flurries started to blow into their faces out of the northwest. By late afternoon Charles Stanton began to lag far behind the others.
Stanton had several strikes against him from the beginning of the escape attempt. His compact, five-foot-five-inch frame made it exceptionally difficult for him to manage the heavy snowshoes as well as his longer-legged companions did. He, more than any of the others, had been battling snow blindness since the first day out, and he was by now likely feeling its full effects—nausea, headaches, and, of course, the loss of much of his vision. Like most of the other single men, he had been living on exceptionally short rations for weeks before they’d left the lake, surviving essentially on any extras that the families with oxen had been able to share with him. And perhaps most important, largely because of his magnanimity, he had by now already hiked across the crest of the Sierra Nevada three times, not to mention the treks across Wasatch and the salt flats and the Forty Mile Desert. Now, finally, he was beginning to reach the limits of his endurance.
Sarah and her companions reached a cluster of conifers in late afternoon and again prepared a fire, but it was another hour before Stanton finally staggered into camp. His declining state was a cause of much anxiety among his companions, not only because he was almost universally liked and admired but also because they all knew he was their most reliable guide. Although L
uis and Salvador had also traveled over the pass, eastbound, there had been no snow on the ground then, and the landscape was now much altered. They had never gone in this direction, as Stanton had, and they spoke little English at any rate. If the party lost Stanton, they knew they themselves might quickly be lost.
Beginning at about 11:00 P.M., it began to snow again. Sarah and Jay shivered and quaked through a more uncomfortable night than any they had thus far experienced.
On the morning of December 19, there were still intermittent snow squalls, but as the day wore on, the skies began to clear and the party once again found themselves moving through a bright white, blinding landscape. To their south, steep and heavily glaciated granite peaks rose abruptly out of the surrounding forest. A little to their north lay the Yuba River, tunneling deep under the snow in some places, breaking free and tumbling brilliantly in sunlight among snow-frosted boulders in other places. Sarah and her companions trudged on almost due west all day, following the sun. A number of them, among them Mary Ann Graves, were now experiencing varying degrees of snow blindness. Once again, though, it was Charles Stanton on whom the sunlight was taking the greatest toll, and it was he who began to fall the farthest behind.
They were now into the fourth day of what they had thought might be a six-day journey, but they were only about fourteen miles west of the lake camps. They had just two more days’ rations of beef, and Johnson’s Ranch was still more than fifty miles to their west. Late in the afternoon, they stumbled down into deep blue shadows lying along the frigid bottomlands beside the Yuba River and made camp. Once again it was an hour or more before a dazed and exhausted Charles Stanton finally trudged into camp.
Sunday, December 20, the fifth day out, began ominously. Though the skies overhead were again clear, dark clouds were gathering on the western horizon, far out over the Sacramento Valley toward which they all yearned. As Jay and the rest of the party began to move down the Yuba, Sarah and Mary Ann hung back, trying to fix a problem with Mary Ann’s snowshoes. When they had made the repair, Sarah started on ahead to catch up with Jay. As Mary Ann began to leave, though, she noticed that Charles Stanton had not departed with the others. He was in fact sitting quietly nearby, resting his head against a snowbank, puffing on his pipe, making no effort to get going. Mary Ann asked if he was coming along, and he said yes, he would join them shortly. She hesitated. Stanton gazed in her direction, but his snow blindness had severely damaged his vision, and he likely could not see her. He did not get up. Finally Mary Ann turned and hurried away to catch up with the others. Stanton continued to sit there smoking. Five months later a party traveling eastward found his bones in a hollow stump near the same spot.
If a modern coroner had conducted an autopsy on Charles Stanton’s body, she likely would have found that—weakened by long-term hunger and malnutrition—he’d died of hypothermia as a result of sitting still in the bitter cold. Chances are his core body temperature simply dropped gradually below the 90-degree-Fahrenheit threshold at which shivering stops and the final symptoms of hypothermia begin to kick in—amnesia, clumsiness, difficulty speaking, mental confusion. At about 86 degrees, his skin would have begun to turn blue, his respiration and pulse would have slowed, major organs would have begun to fail, and finally his brain would have died.
But Charles Stanton probably died psychologically before he died physiologically. As John Leach points out in Survival Psychology, science has long recognized that under some circumstances people are able “to die gently, and often suddenly, through no organic cause.” In other words, we are able, sometimes, to will ourselves to death, or at least to cease willing ourselves to live.
In 1972, in a situation much like that which Stanton, Sarah, and the other members of the snowshoe party faced, Nando Parrado had a kind of epiphany, as he relates in Miracle in the Andes. It came to him in his moment of maximum despair. He and his fellow rugby players, trying to hike out of the location where their airplane had crashed high in the Andes, scaled a steep ridge that they thought separated them from safety, only to find that snowy peaks stretched away from them in all directions. Aghast at their predicament, Parrado fell to his knees in the snow and took in a staggering realization. Death was the rule, life the exception. Life was at best a transitory dream, set in a universe that was entirely indifferent to his fate. Whether to cling to that fragile dream, Parrado realized then and there, was up to him as it is up to all of us, moment by moment. Whether to embrace what we are all thrust into, squealing with astonishment and rage, or to fall back into the comfortable, dark, quiet realm of the insentient. Nando Parrado decided to fight for the dream. Charles Stanton, it appears, after all his heroic efforts to aid his fellow travelers, had chosen to slip back into the darkness.
The snowshoe party traveled down the Yuba toward an abrupt granite knob now known as Cisco Butte. There they left the river, turning south to climb and cross the eastern flank of another peak, then turning west again. From time to time, they paused at high spots and scanned the snowy landscape to their rear, looking for Stanton. They were increasingly apprehensive about losing him, but they knew they could not afford to stop so long as the weather held out. Each time, failing to see him, they pressed on into the still and silent whiteness. They crossed bridges of snow twelve or fifteen feet thick arching gracefully over streams. They passed places where springs lay twenty or twenty-five feet deep at the bottoms of wells that the water had melted in the snow. In the afternoon they finally descended into a flat piece of terrain now called Sixmile Valley. It had been a hard day, nearly eight miles of tough snowshoeing, and it had exacted a heavy price from them.
They had by now spent four nights lying out in the open in the high Sierra, where nighttime temperatures in December run in the low twenties or high teens. They had not yet even begun to descend below the snow line, but their supply of dried beef was already nearly exhausted. Hunger cramped their stomachs and clouded their thinking. Their boots—soaked and tattered before they had even started—had now begun to fall to pieces, and as a result their feet ached from continual exposure to snow and ice. The men in general seemed to be faring worse than the women. Sarah’s father in particular was growing weaker, and even Jay was having a hard time keeping up with Sarah. She began to hang back with him, traveling a bit in the rear of the rest of the party.
When they made camp that night, setting fire to a dry tree and gathering around it as had become their habit, they wondered again, more urgently now, how they would find their way forward from here without Stanton and whether “here” was in fact where they were supposed to be. But they had bigger problems than they yet knew. As they sat around the burning tree that night, changes were under way high in the upper atmosphere, changes that had been months in the making.
In certain years, years when La Niña conditions prevail in the southern Pacific, a meteorological phenomenon known as the Madden-Julian oscillation is sometimes born in the Indian Ocean. The MJO, as meteorologists call it for short, carries vast amounts of relatively warm and very wet air from the Indian Ocean into the central Pacific. When cold low-pressure systems move south out of the Arctic, as they regularly do, they siphon this wet air northward from the central Pacific, drawing it toward the Pacific Northwest. If the cold air from the Arctic collides with the wet air from the central Pacific, enormous amounts of precipitation fall along the West Coast of the United States. Those of us who live in the Northwest usually get the brunt of this phenomenon, which we not so lovingly refer to as “the Pineapple Express,” but sometimes the storm track sags to the south, carrying the moisture-rich air into California. The result of such scenarios is typically widespread flooding in the lowlands and, sometimes, epic blizzards in the high Sierra.
One such record-breaking storm hit this section of the central Sierra Nevada in January of 1952, dumping more than twelve feet of snow on Donner Summit within a few days. While it was just one in a series of storms that produced a total of sixty-five feet of snowfall that year, this part
icular storm generated news around the country. On January 13, enormous windblown drifts trapped a westbound passenger train, the City of San Francisco, at Yuba Gap. At first the 226 passengers and crew made light of the situation. Many of them were servicemen on their way to San Francisco to be shipped off to the Korean War, and they had no objection at all to sitting in one place for a while, eating the railroad’s food and drinking its liquor. But after thirty-six hours the diesel fuel ran out and temperatures in the passenger cars began to plummet. Food began to run short, and tempers began to flare.
Hundreds of volunteers worked with shovels to reach the train, but it took them seventy-two long hours to get there. As the passengers finally hiked out along the path that had been cleared through the drifts for them, many of the children wore on their heads pillow-cases with eyeholes cut in them to protect them from the frigid winds still slicing through the mountains. No one knows if any of the passengers thought about the Donner Party as they sat on the train for those three days, but they might well have—the spot where the City of San Francisco was stranded at Yuba Gap was not more than a half a mile from where Sarah and the snowshoe party likely camped on December 20, 1846.
At the lake camp, on opposite sides of the log partition that separated the Graves side of the cabin from the Reed side, Margret Reed and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Graves were engaged in preserving the lives of their children. To stretch the little beef they had left, to make it last as long as possible, the two mothers had begun to cut strips from the hides of the oxen that had been slaughtered. They held the strips over open flames, singeing off the hair, then boiled them until the collagen separated from the hides and formed a thick, unpalatable, but reasonably nutritious glue. This glue they rationed out to their children, who gagged it down unhappily.