Getting Dirty at Donner SP

One of the things I love about camping in California in the summer is that you are virtually assured that there will be no rain. This makes packing and planning easier however it does have one pretty major downside, especially when camping with kids. In many of the campgrounds we go to in the summer the dirt, which is bone dry from lack of water, is in a fine powder which when combined with running and feet shuffling kids means that it gets everywhere!

We just got back from 4 days camping in Donner Memorial State Park and had a slightly dirty but no less fun blast of a time. Donner is high in the Sierra Nevada range right at the pass where Interstate 80 goes over the mountain range. It has hiking, a lake for swimming and boating, a memorial and museum. We went with our friends the Wilde's and their 3 kids so there were 10 of us in total and plenty of kids running around.

The campsites we had were fairly open with just a few tall pines around but many white spruce saplings around to give privacy plus hiding places for the kids (they played many a game of hide and seek). As with other camping trips these days we gave the kids a fairly generous boundary around the two adjacent sites and let them have the run of it. This mean that they had lots of freedom and could be out of eye-site but never out of earshot. Daytime highs were in the upper 70's/low 80's and the evenings were cool in the upper 30's to low 40's. The nights were so clear we saw the milky way (one would forget it is there with the light pollution around Santa Clara), many satellites and many shooting stars. It was a great nighttime show.

For activities we did some short walks to explore the campsite and went swimming in the lake. The lake water was probably only about 65-70 degrees so it was a chilly transition but once you were in it was OK. On Saturday we rented 2 Sea Doo's which are personal watercraft. Think of them as motorcycles on the water and they are fast with top speeds of 55 MPH! On the lake there is a 35MPH speed limit but it was rather easy to creep up and over that. We took turns taking the kids out for long rides and Julia and Lea mostly liked it while the Wilde boys loved it. Nicolas even liked it for a little while but ultimately wanted to come back in which just happen to correspond to the end of our time so that was OK.

For me there was also a sad moment when we were going through the memorial museum and watching a short film which recalls the tragedy of the Donner Party which became stranded at Donner Pass in the winter of 1846-1847. Interestingly enough also the train tunnel which you can see from the campsite was built in 1868 which means that just 20 years after America was already making it possible to travel by train through that same pass.

All in all we had a great time despite the fact that the kids had a thick coating of dirt on them for a good portion of the trip, they didn't seem to mind!