This is an amazing thing to see for anyone, but particularly for a guy who calls himself a Civil Engineer….I sometimes think that if I had lived 150 years ago, I would have been a surveyor, laying out the route of the early railroads!
From about 1863 until 1865, an army of workers, including many Chinese immigrants, toiled to cut the first pathway over the Sierra Nevada mountains. This pass was significant in our nations history because it provided the first direct link between the eastern United States and the riches, promised and real, that lay waiting in California.
Today we walked through those tunnels they cut through the granite mountains, largely by hand with the help of the newly developed nitroglycerin explosives. You can still see the soot on the sides and the top of the tunnels, deposited there over so many decades by steam locomotives and every type of train engine since.
Donner Pass is also the site of that famous event in history where the ill-fated Donner Party, making their way to California, found themselves blocked by snow in November 1846. They were forced to spend the winter there on the east side of the mountains. Of the 81 emigrants, only 45 survived to reach California, some of them resorting to cannibalism to survive.
Paul's Point of View 
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