Daniel James Brown

And they struggle and they slide and they just run into a terrible amount of trouble trying to get their oxen up this snow-covered boulder-strewn cliffs that are in front of them.

And they can't make it.

The wagon starts sliding backwards.

So they try again.

They still can't make it.

Stanton and the mules go ahead to try to break a path.

For the rest of them, they get bogged down.

The snow is falling now at just an extraordinary rate.

This is what happens in California.

Sometimes we get these atmospheric rivers.

They usually go into the northwest.

But when they come into California and hit the Sierra Nevada mountains, you just get extraordinary levels of snow.

So finally, they realize they're not going to make it, and they retreat back to the eastern end of the lake in desperate situations now.

And then over the next couple of days, they hastily erect some shelters, log cabins.

There's one cabin pre-existing from an earlier party.

And then they build two other primitive log cabins.

There's three main cabins.

They're spread over, yes, several miles.

One thing, Franklin Graves, the family I follow most closely and in different stars above is the Graves family for a number of reasons.

I'm focused on one young woman in that party.