I like this venture into historical fiction! But your title doesn’t work… Donner party was in the Sierra Nevadas. ;-) Also, check your last sentence — you have “reached” in there twice.

Aurelia, but nobody ever heard of Springtime in the Sierra Nevadas. As for a double dose of “reached”, I was trying out a new syntactical approach in which the adverb is surrounded by the verb. I guess I’m done completely done with that.

LOL. Maybe “Springtime in the Rockies” is like a “what could have been” thing — rather than Winter in the Sierra Nevadas when everything turned to shit. Ah, if only they’d gone through the Rockies in springtime…

I suspected it was the donner party with the line, " we camped about a mile east of the pass."

It give the expression “Having a friend for lunch” a whole new meaning.

Any hoo. Love historical references. bravo.