Donner Pass: winter wonderland

AIRVŪZ STAFF NOTE : AirVuz contributor Allan Crawford brings us this excellent drone video of California's Donner Pass, one of the main passages through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Situated at an altitude of 2.15k meters above sea level (just over 7k ft.), the pass is named after an ill-fated group of 83 pioneers en route westward to California who were forced to spend the winter of 1846-47 here. Nearly half the members of the Donner Party perished from cold and starvation; those who survived did so by consuming the remains of their dead comrades.

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The 7,000 foot high Donner Pass is known for it's massive amounts of snow and it's beauty. The pass rises 1,200 feet above Donner Lake and the site of the infamous Donner Party. The pass was what stopped the Donner Party in the winter of 1846-47, when they tried to cross in October. Imagine taking wagons over this pass. Today old highway 40 climbs through the pass with the Rainbow Bridge, which was built in 1926, situated a few hundred feet below that top of the pass. Today interstate 80 parallels old highway 40 making this route ideal for bicyclists. The tunnels visible in the video were built by the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860's as part of the transcontinental rail road. The tunnels were abandoned when a new tunnel was built in the 1990's. Today the tunnels are popular place to hike. The ski tracks visible in the video are from skiers and snowboarders skiing off of the "back side" of Sugar Bowl's Mt Judah ridge where there is a "back country" vertical run of somewhere near 2000 feet skiing from the ridge to Donner Lake. Video was shot with a Mavic Pro 2.