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| Summit Lake - my first day lunch spot along the Donner Lake Rim Trail |
So this August was going to be the Bones to Blue loop, which begins and ends in Truckee, CA. This bikepacking route consists of separate 2 loops – a smaller loop above Truckee (Bones) and then a bigger loop around Lake Tahoe (Blue) for a total of about 400km/250 miles. The "Bones" doesn't refer to the shape of the loop, but rather the fate of the Donner party in 1846/47. The Donner Party started like one of countless other treks to California, but turned into a nightmare. Based on one count of the group (which includes the Miwok guides Luis and Salvador), 42 out of 90 died and cannibalism saved some of the survivors.
Two local cyclists, Forest Baker and Blake Bockius, have done much of the routing, focusing on single track trails. They know what makes for a good route and they have an area that offers the possibilities. Pavement is minimal and even that is scenic and not aggravating at all (very different from riding on the shoulder of a freeway in Canada). In short, this is one of the best multi-day bikepacking routes one can find. While the fastest riders can do this under 48 hours, it is not an easy route. I think that 4 days/3 nights is a good fast touring pace for it, 80 hours or so total with 35-40 hours of moving time. These would not be short or easy days, but not grueling either.
Forest organized a group start that I wanted to join and just the week before I get some odd knee pain. No obvious reason for the knee problems, it started without warning but was so bad that I could hardly ride my bicycle to work (flat pavement). Very disappointing, but I just couldn't ride that week. It is the type of event I like, low key, meet with a few like-minded people the day before and at a group start and then everybody goes at their own pace. The site for the route with gpx files is here: http://bonestoblue.com/
A week later, though, my knee issues disappeared and I felt good enough to try on my own. Kathy and I combined a trip to Truckee with a visit to Davis first. We rode our bicycles around Truckee, stopped by for a quick visit at Forest's s house in the mountains above town, and took a picture at the Donner monument. I wasn't on the route (nor had I finished it) yet in that picture, just testing the full rig the afternoon before starting.
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| This must be a contestant for the dumbest monument award. The kitschy sculpture is inscribed with gibberish: "Virile to risk, and find, kindly withal with a ready help, facing the brunt of fate, undomitable, unafraid." Romanticism going off rails, the only alternative explanation is translation from a Chinese repair manual. |
Attempts trying to deconstruct the meaning are fruitless. Where does the kindly ready help come from? It was a divisive and distrustful group that caused its own deaths at a rapid rate before the winter. James Reed fatally stabbed John Snyder on October 5 and was almost lynched for it, but eventually exiled without supplies (Reed survived, later becoming police chief of San Jose). Hardcoop, who had been riding in Louis Keseberg's wagon after his legs gave out, was thrown out and told to walk on October 7. He quickly fell behind and was abandoned. Wolfinger was murdered in mid-October by his two companions that readily stayed back to "help" him (Reinhardt confessed when he was dying himself two months later). William Pike was shot on October 30 and painfully died a short time later.
Among a group that had many internal problems (including theft and murder), a more selfless achievement was that Charles Stanton went ahead and came back with mules and two Miwok Indian guides (Luis and Salvador). Stanton himself withered away smoking his pipe while trying to lead out the "snow shoe party" (undomitable?). Luis and Salvador were probably murdered and eaten by the others around January 9 (kindly?). The women had a much higher survival rate than the men. Of the snowshoe party, 8 of the 10 men died, but all women made it. So much for virile to risk.
The Donner party started the usual wagon route in 1846 that led west from St. Louis to Fort Bridger in Wyoming, then northwest into Idaho before turning southwest through Nevada and on to California. The guidebook author Lansford Hastings promoted a shortcut from Fort Bridger through the Wasatch mountain range, then south of Utah’s Great Salt Lake across the Salt Lake Desert, and finally rejoined the usual California Trail in Nevada. When the Donner Party came to Fort Bridger, they were assured by Jim Bridger and his partner Louis Vasquez that the Hastings shortcut was "a fine, level road, with plenty of water and grass, with the exception before stated (a forty-mile waterless stretch)." That was a lie, because the waterless stretch was twice the distance and the "fine level road" required breaking trail for wagons. Bridger and Vasquez' primary motive was getting a new route established that would bring traffic to their Fort Bridger. Vasquez deceived the Donner party by failing to give them a letter from a prior party that explicitly warned them not to take the Hastings cutoff under any circumstances. Taking the Hastings cutoff delayed the Donner party by a month over taking the regular route, which eventually proved fatal for many of them when they became trapped by a November storm in the Sierra Nevada. The Death Valley '49ers who were also late in the year took a similarly ill-advised shortcut 3 years later, but much further south, knowing the fate of the Donner party.
The Bones loop goes north of Truckee, past Alder Creek where the 2 Donner families spent the winter in of 1846/47. George and Jacob Donner had fallen behind the rest of the group after breaking an axle on a wagon. Most other families were a few miles ahead and wintered at Donner Lake near the current monument. Around Prosser Hill, it goes into an area also used by motorized vehicles, which makes for a sandy and unpleasant trail. There are a lot of houses north of Truckee, Forest lives there, but there are sweet trails around them with cute names, like the Cinnamon Twist.
Shortly afterwards, I get on the Donner Rim Trail, nice single track that is leading westwards.
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| along Donner Rim Trail |
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| Hole in the Leg section on the Hole in the Ground trail. |
By the afternoon, I cross the freeway and continue on the south side. Here was some of my favorite riding of the first loop.
The last section is over Donner Pass and through the original Donner Pass train tunnels, riding over the top of the China Wall, which exerted a high toll among the Chinese laborers who did the dangerous and arduous work to connect the transcontinental railroad through the Sierras.
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| In the tunnel! |
The tunnels are initially cute, but that stretch gets a bit tedious after a while. Fortunately, it is downhill!
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| Near the top at the tunnels, looking to how the road climbs up (or down?) from Donner lake. The picture doesn't capture the challenge for travelers before the railway was built - especially in November 1849! "At the far end of the lake stood a great jumble of granite cliffs, an imposing rock wall squatting squarely in their path west, rising more than eleven hundred feet above the level of the water. They had never seen anything like this in the Rockies nor in the Wasatch nor anywhere in their lives. There was a slight notch in the southern end of the wall, the pass through which they were supposed to travel, but notch or no, the thing looked utterly impassable for wagons... To make matters worse, every ledge and crevice and possible foothold on the face of the cliffs was already laden with deep drifts of snow" Daniel James Brown, The Indifferent Stars Above, Ch. 6. |
The first Flume trail, coming after the climb out of Incline Village, is the prototype of smooth flowing single track (maybe Incline-Flume trail?). Kathy was going to be trail running and she took this trail, too. I trust there are hardcore riders who will find this just "too easy and boring", but it was my favorite trail.
I could not take the next Flume trail (Marlette-Flume?) as it was closed due to slides/repairs and detoured via the Rim trail.
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| On the Rim trail |
So much better than anything on the Great Trail/ TransCanada Trail!
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| Some rockier sections that I would ride on a short day ride. With luggage on a long trip, I get off and walk. Also, I didn't do that well riding chunk on the Hole in the Ground trail on day 1! |
One positive surprise was the absence of any annoying bugs. Forest had mentioned mosquitoes and apparently they were annoying at a few spots earlier in the month. But I was not pestered by any mosquitoes, not even around Spooner Lake where I took a break late in the afternoon.
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| Just such a good trail going around Lake Tahoe! |
I did not complete the full loop this time. Kathy had enough trail running after a few days, which is harder on your knees than cycling, and was ready to go home. Forest had told me that the dirt road towards Tinkers Know and Yogi's trail were currently in bad shape, so it was an easy decision to skip this end section and save it for 2019.
We drove home on the eastern side of the Sierras and stopped by Mono Lake. The bizarre rock formations are Tufa, which are sort of limestone towers formed by minerals in the water. Much further south, in the middle of the Mojave desert, there are similar formations, the Trona Pinnacles: mojave-desert-winter-trip-1
