Donner, Party of 87 Please

May 6, 2024 – Inn Town Campground, Nevada City, CA – New Frontier RV Park, Winnemucca, NV

Ok, Donner Party jokes aside, the linked wikipedia page is a fascinating read. We’ve only skimmed it but it really shows the hardships all the westward bound settlers faced.

But why reference the Donner Party? Today we drive over the Donner Pass. This is, up to now, the highest point of our journey.

Donner Pass is “only” 7,056 feet high. That’s seem easy, we were higher than that a few days ago. But not in Clifford the Big Red Dog towing the 4,500lb Jeep. We decided it would be wise to unhook the Jeep and drive both vehicles over the pass.

That left Paul in the Jeep taking pictures. How did he do that safely? “Hey Siri, Launch Camera.” The phone was already mounted for navigation so all he had to do was make sure it was safe and then press the shutter button. Of course 90% of the pictures were blurry since it focused on the schmutz on the windshield, but some of them did work out. Here we are, approaching the Donner Pass train sheds (susan here: it looks like a limb sticking out from a tree, but it’s not. It’s quite far away and I assure you, a train can fit in that structure). They’re built to keep the snow off the tracks that the aforementioned Chinese immigrants made.

We reconnected at Cabela’s and had lunch in the parking lot—in the RV section of course! Some unobservant people parked their car in such a way it was going to make leaving more difficult. First, that area was for RVs and second RVs, especially ones towing, need a bit more room to get around. Fortunately they left before we finished lunch.

And hey, welcome to Nevada! Triple trucks? Seriously? They were everywhere. We don’t like them. Not at all.

Some more pretty scenery.

One would think that we get jaded by all the beauty around us. We don’t. Each state has its own set of wondrous things to see.

Paul “had to” stop and do radio stuff. The radio thing he does gives you FIPS—remember those? Fake Internet Points?—for doing things in each state. He learned from the CA experience to get it done as early as possible. Those CA FIPs were tough to come by and he didn’t want Nevada to follow suit. We took an exit ramp and pulled over on the side of the road, Paul got into the Jeep, put up the 17’ antenna and went to work.

He needs ten contacts, aka QSOs, to make it official and it was slow going for some reason. When the antenna started bending from the wind, he glanced at his logging software, saw that he had 10 and called it. 

We continued down the road.

Soon we were seeing salt devils as we were crossing into the area. It’s wide open country and of course it was windy. Plus we weren’t far from where the Bonneville Salt Flats are.

We pulled into a nice campground for the night but there was drama at the registration desk. They had given our site away to someone with a “big rig”. Uhhh, we have a big rig theirs was only slightly longer. They gave us a site a couple slots over which they said they weren’t sure we could turn out of. Interesting that the site to our right had a smaller Class C that could easily have made the turn. Why didn’t they put us there? Just WHY did they create this unnecessary drama? (susan here: I think that my eyes rolled back into my head a half dozen times. She admitted she’d never driven an RV. I’d like to know how she knew what we could or couldn’t do. It makes me think the other people couldn’t drive their RV very well and insisted on a long turning radius.) The site was very level so that was a plus. We don’t get too picky when it’s a single night stop. Is it safe? Yes. Do we have power? Yes. Good, call it done. You can tolerate a lot if it’s only a night or two.

Then the unthinkable happened! Paul went to upload his ham radio logs he said a naughty word when he realized he had only had 9, not the needed 10. His logging software had logged a duplicate QSO which he saw and deleted but he didn’t realize the count stayed at 10 when it should have dropped to 9. He needed to activate NV again. He got online and a NV ham was super helpful. There was a place in Winnemuca, NV that he could activate in the morning that was just 2 miles away. In the morning we decided to get a move on because we wanted to avoid the ever present afternoon winds as much as we could.

You can’t see it here but the surrounding mountains had snow at higher elevations. The sunset was real pretty.

Daily: 252 (They usually averaged 15 miles a day on the Oregon Trail)

Total: 4,699

Driving Miles/Day: 247

Overall Miles/Day: 90

mpg: 6.7