Donner Memorial State Park
Posted on February 26, 2008
The park is located amid the pine and fir forests jut east of Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada. Surrounded by magnificent alpine scenery and directly adjacent to a beautiful three-mile-long lake, the park offers vacationers a wide range of recreational opportunities including camping, picnicking, hiking, boating, fishing and waterskiing.
The Emigrant Trail Museum at the park is open year round and includes exhibits about the human and natural history of this area.
The forest is made up primarily of lodgepole pine, Jeffrey pine and white fir. Because of its elevation, nearly 6,000 feet, there is no poison oak. Deer, squirrels, chipmunks, porcupines, raccoons, beavers and a wide variety of birds are commonly seen. In and near the park are some fascinating traces of the geologic process that shaped this portion of the Sierra Nevada. Rounded, smooth-surfaced rock outcrops are the result of granitic intrusions that welled up into the earth’s surface–giant bubbles of molten rock, cooling and hardening as they rose. More recently that granite bedrock has been exposed by erosion.
The Sierra’s steep eastern face, the barrier that faced the Donner Party and other California immigrants, was formed over the last few million years by the tilting up of a gigantic section of the earth’s crust. The huge granite block tipped up dramatically on the east and tipped down on the west to disappear beneath the accumulated sediments that form the Sacramento Valley.
Glaciers dominated the crest of the Sierra Nevada throughout much of the last million years. One of them carved out the Truckee Basin, where the park is located, depositing gravel and even some huge boulders in what is now a thickly forested area. When the glacier began to retreat, it left behind a terminal moraine of loose soil and gravel that blocked the creek channel and resulted in the formation of Donner Lake.
The park has more than three miles of frontage on Donner Lake and Donner Creek. Fishing is not spectacular, though the lake is planted periodically with catchable trout, and both trout and kokanee are sometimes caught. A valid sport fishing license is required. Many fishermen prefer to use the park as a base to visit nearby lakes. There is no boat launching ramp in the park, but a public ramp is available in the northwest corner of Donner Lake. The lake is open to both power and sail boats.
The park has about two and a half miles of hiking trails, and there are excellent trail opportunities in the neighboring Tahoe National Forest. Hiking information is available at the trail museum.
» Filed Under Sightseeing Tags: Tags:Donner Lake, Memorial State Park, Tahoe
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