2/1/2024 0 Comments Salt flats utah i-80The ill-fated Donner-Reed Party infamously took that route, but got mired down in the mud-flats of the Bonneville Salt Flats.Interstate 80 ( I-80) is a part of the Interstate Highway System that runs from San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey. Map of the Hasting Cutoff Trail (image taken from a public domain pamphlet provided by the Donner-Reed Pioneer Museum) The Hastings Cutoff was an alternative route for westward emigrants to travel to California, as proposed by Lansford Hastings in “ The Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California“. The Donner-Reed trail across the Skull Valley after they passed the present Salt Lake Valley. The journey west for the American Pioneers in 1846, usually took between 4 and 6 months, but the Donner Party was slowed after electing to follow a new route called the “Hastings Cutoff, which bypassed established trails and instead crossed the Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake Desert (Bonneville Salt Flats) in present-day Utah. I’m posing in front of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the Spring of 2011 Some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the bodies of those who had succumbed to starvation, sickness and extreme cold. Delayed by a series of mishaps on the Bonneville Salt Flats, they spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The Donner-Reed Party was a group of American Pioneers who migrated to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. Map of Central-West Utah (Bonneville Salt Flats). In the summer of 2011, I had decided to investigate the route taken by the Donner-Reed Party in 1846, across the Bonneville Salt Flats between Salt Lake City and Wendover, Utah.
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