The Indifferent Stars Above (17 page)

There is one tender mercy that snow blindness offers to most of its victims. The cornea is remarkably good at healing itself. Given a chance, it will repair the damage spontaneously within about forty-eight hours. That, however, benefits only those who are able to get in out of the snow and sunlight or take other precautions. Those who continue to expose themselves day after day to the same levels of UVB cannot heal. Their eyes inevitably suffer something like what a sunbather's skin would suffer if he or she persisted in lying out in the sun every day with red, blistered skin upturned to the sun's unrelenting rays.

 

A
s the day wore on and the snow covering Truckee Lake grew softer, Charley Burger and William Murphy gave up and turned around partway across the lake. Without snowshoes they simply could not keep up with the others, and with the cliffs ahead growing closer, they must have known they would never make it over the pass. That left fifteen in the snowshoe party—nine men, five women, and a boy. Beyond the lake there was another mile or so of gradually rising, forested, and boulder-strewn terrain before they would reach the abrupt granite cliffs that they would ultimately have to climb to reach the pass. The days were short now in mid-December, and they needed time to make camp before the sun set. So when they finally trudged off the ice at the western end of the lake, they climbed a small hill and removed their snowshoes and packs. They hunted for firewood, gathered pine boughs for makeshift beds, struck a fire using sparks from the flintlock rifle that Eddy was carrying, built a fire on a platform of logs, spread out their blankets, and sat down to ration out their first portions of dried beef.

As Sarah sat with Jay on their pile of pine branches, chewing the cardboardlike beef, she could look down the length of the lake at the semicircle of snowy trees fringing the far end, painted peach and rose
by the light of the sunset streaming over the pass above them. In among the trees, blue curlicues of smoke rose from the cabins. The easternmost of those, she knew, was from the fire her mother was tending. At this very moment, her brothers and sisters were gathered around that fire eating their own dwindling share of the beef, wondering about her as much as she was wondering about them. It was a hard, cold thing to be so near and yet so irretrievably far.

She and Jay slept that night, or tried to sleep, beneath thin blankets under clear, crystalline skies. The frigid black vault of the heavens above them was moonless but ablaze with shimmering stars. The southeast wind that had blown all day continued through the night, making the long, low, mournful sound that only wind in pines can make.

 

T
he next day, December 17, began with what they believed would be the toughest challenge they would face—climbing the east face of the pass. The weather was bright, clear, and cold again, all they could have hoped for in that regard. They made a little coffee, chewed a bit of dried beef, strapped on the snowshoes, and began climbing through thickly forested country toward the granite cliffs that lay beyond.

At first the going was relatively easy—over the first mile they gained only about 250 feet in elevation. But that modest rise brought them out of the forest and into a very different kind of landscape, one in which there were few trees but large expanses of granite rising abruptly out of the snow. Like much of the crest of the Sierra Nevada, this landscape had been scoured by a series of glaciers over the past million years. Moving ponderously downslope, sculpting out the depression in which Donner Lake now lies, and then retreating again, these glaciers had left behind a jumble of highly polished flat surfaces, house-size boulders, deep crevices, and abrupt cliffs. After the last of the glaciers finally melted away, another ten thousand years or so of additional exposure to brutal weather had shattered much of the granite into loose talus—piles of broken rock that had accumulated in deep drifts on some of the gentler slopes. To all this was now added
perhaps ten or twelve feet of snow and liberal applications of ice wherever water had run over the granite and then refrozen.

They were only three-quarters of a mile from the narrow notch in the summit that constituted the pass itself, but they still had nearly a thousand feet to climb before they reached it. They worked their way up among the rocks, following Salvador and Luis. With the snowshoes strapped to their feet, they could not walk easily on rock and ice, so they tried to stay on open expanses of snow, but at intervals they were forced to cross stretches of slippery rock. As the grade steepened and the air grew thinner, they had to stop more and more frequently, gasping for breath before pushing on.

A month earlier all of them had likely been in far better than average physical condition. Most of them were young. Their systems were by now acclimated to the 5,936-foot elevation of the lake camp. They had for the most part walked all the way from the Missouri River, climbed over the Wasatch, cut brush, toted water, and chopped firewood for weeks on end. If they had been well nourished, their aerobic capacity should have been nearly optimal. But they were far from optimally fit. Their meager diets had by now begun to erode both their muscle mass and the capacity of their lungs.

The powdery snow and steepness of the climb made every step harder than they might have expected when they set out. The snow deepened toward the summit. Even with their snowshoes, the men in particular found themselves sinking deeply with each step. Sarah and the four other women—of whom twenty-three-year-old Amanda McCutchen was the oldest—moved out in front. Because they were lighter, the women were better able to tackle the powder and beat down a path. The men began to follow in their footsteps.

By early afternoon they were high among the cliffs, scrabbling for footholds and handholds now as they worked their way up the ever-steeper route. The bright sun bore down on them through a relatively thin atmosphere at nearly seven thousand feet, and the reflection of the sunlight off of snow and rock and ice began to take an additional toll on their bodies. Charles Stanton, in particular, began to feel the effects of snow blindness.

All of them were also likely suffering in another way from the
effects of the sun. Thus far they had managed to stay dry enough and warm enough to avoid what inevitably would be the greatest danger they would face in their quest to escape the mountains—hypothermia. But as they struggled up the mountain wearing layers of heavy, dark wool, the glacier-polished granite, ice, and snow began to reflect the sun's heat from every surface, and their bodies increasingly had to labor to ward off hypothermia's opposite—hyperthermia.

 

O
rdinarily the human body is quite adept at maintaining a steady core temperature very near 98 degrees Fahrenheit. When our core temperatures begin to vary even by a degree or two from this fixed point, our bodies take measures to return themselves to a state of thermal homeostasis, a normal temperature. When we get too cold, for instance, we shiver as the body vibrates small muscles around vital organs in order to burn calories and generate warmth. Goose bumps rise on the skin in an effort (mostly vain in our case) to fluff up our primordial fur and provide an insulating layer of air above our skin. When we get too warm, on the other hand, we sweat so that evaporation can cool the surface of the skin, carrying heat away from the core of the body. But the margins for error are narrow. Hyperthermia begins to set in when core body temperatures rise above 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Brain death begins at 106 degrees. Conversely, hypothermia begins when core body temperatures sink below 95 degrees. Death occurs at 86 degrees. So whether the outside temperature is 110 degrees as we trek across the salt flats of Utah or 10 degrees as we sleep in the snow on Donner Pass, our bodies must maintain their inner workings within about a 6-degree range if we are to remain reasonably functional, and within a 20-degree range if we are to remain alive.
*

In a 1982 experiment conducted on climbers ascending Alaska's Mount Denali and documented in the PBS television show
Deadly Ascent,
Dr. Peter Hackett discovered that even well-conditioned al
pine climbers sometimes experience dangerous fluctuations of internal body temperatures. Using data transmitted by NASA-designed radio-thermometer capsules that each climber swallowed, he found that the exertion of climbing on sunny slopes while dressed in clothing designed to retain body heat could cause core temperatures to soar rapidly into the hyperthermic range. Even more troubling, he found that those same climbers' core temperatures could plunge just as rapidly into the hypothermic range when they stopped climbing and sat down on snow or cold rock. Aside from the direct dangers posed by hyperthermia and hypothermia, Hackett's study suggests that the temperature fluctuations that occur within the bodies of climbers place enormous physiological stresses on the body as it struggles mightily to return itself to the state of thermal homeostasis on which it depends for survival. This additional stress, added to all the other stresses of climbing—the thin air, the extreme exertion, the unrelenting need for concentration, the glare of the sun, the threat of frostbite, and so on—is sometimes what pushes climbers' bodies over the edge, into a kind of death spiral.

As Sarah and Jay struggled up the face of what would eventually be called Donner Pass on December 17, 1846, they knew nothing of hypothermia or hyperthermia. But under all the layers of sweat-soaked wool in which they were swaddled, their bodies were already fighting a silent, internal war between death by fire and death by ice, swinging back and forth between thermal extremes in a way that threatened to destabilize their regulatory systems and their bodies' precious reserves.

 

B
y late afternoon they had scaled the pass and stood near the eastern end of the long valley in which Sutter's mules had become bogged down back on November 22. There—despite their exhaustion and the desperate situation in which they found themselves—a few of them paused for a few moments to take in the grandeur of the scenery. A cluster of snowcapped peaks lay just to the southwest. To the north stood the massive basalt buttresses of 9,104-foot-tall Castle Peak. The sky overhead was a pale, translucent blue. The darker blue of the lake
glinted far below them like a polished oval of lapis lazuli. Someone commented that they were about as near to heaven as they could get. Mary Ann Graves stopped to watch her companions move out in front of her and took note of her surroundings: “The scenery was too grand for me to pass without notice…. Being a little in the rear of the party, I had a chance to observe the company ahead, trudging along with packs on their backs. It reminded me of some Norwegian fur company among the icebergs.” Not everyone was taking in the sights, though. Most of the others simply pushed doggedly on ahead, heads down, taking one heavy, awkward step at a time.

None of them moved far beyond the pass that day, though. The hours were too short, the snow too heavy, their bodies too exhausted. Just west of the summit, they once again built a fire on a platform of logs, chewed their meager rations of beef, and fell asleep on the snow. Despite their exertions they had traveled only about three miles from the previous night's camp.

The third day, December 18, once again dawned clear and cold. They slogged the length of the valley, through deep powder. When they left the valley behind, they moved southwest, skirting a high granite peak and then descending very slowly toward a cluster of frozen lakes. The sun remained bright, the snow a brilliant white, and the temperatures moderate through the morning, but in the afternoon the sky clouded up and snow flurries started to blow into their faces out of the northwest. By late afternoon Charles Stanton began to lag far behind the others.

Stanton had several strikes against him from the beginning of the escape attempt. His compact, five-foot-five-inch frame made it exceptionally difficult for him to manage the heavy snowshoes as well as his longer-legged companions did. He, more than any of the others, had been battling snow blindness since the first day out, and he was by now likely feeling its full effects—nausea, headaches, and, of course, the loss of much of his vision. Like most of the other single men, he had been living on exceptionally short rations for weeks before they'd left the lake, surviving essentially on any extras that the families with oxen had been able to share with him. And perhaps most important, largely because of his magnanimity, he had by now
already hiked across the crest of the Sierra Nevada three times, not to mention the treks across Wasatch and the salt flats and the Forty Mile Desert. Now, finally, he was beginning to reach the limits of his endurance.

Sarah and her companions reached a cluster of conifers in late afternoon and again prepared a fire, but it was another hour before Stanton finally staggered into camp. His declining state was a cause of much anxiety among his companions, not only because he was almost universally liked and admired but also because they all knew he was their most reliable guide. Although Luis and Salvador had also traveled over the pass, eastbound, there had been no snow on the ground then, and the landscape was now much altered. They had never gone in this direction, as Stanton had, and they spoke little English at any rate. If the party lost Stanton, they knew they themselves might quickly be lost.

Beginning at about 11:00
P.M.
, it began to snow again. Sarah and Jay shivered and quaked through a more uncomfortable night than any they had thus far experienced.

On the morning of December 19, there were still intermittent snow squalls, but as the day wore on, the skies began to clear and the party once again found themselves moving through a bright white, blinding landscape. To their south, steep and heavily glaciated granite peaks rose abruptly out of the surrounding forest. A little to their north lay the Yuba River, tunneling deep under the snow in some places, breaking free and tumbling brilliantly in sunlight among snow-frosted boulders in other places. Sarah and her companions trudged on almost due west all day, following the sun. A number of them, among them Mary Ann Graves, were now experiencing varying degrees of snow blindness. Once again, though, it was Charles Stanton on whom the sunlight was taking the greatest toll, and it was he who began to fall the farthest behind.