Group to try to retrace steps of Donner Party

We just couldn’t let this stuff go …

A pair of backcountry endurance athletes who became obsessed with the Donner Party spent the last seven years researching and exploring the Sierra on foot to try to pinpoint the final 90mile (145kilometer) route survivors of the infamous tale of cannibalism finally cut through mountain snow drifts to safety in the winter of 1846-47.

Now, four veteran ultrarunners from Northern California are setting out on snowshoes to retrace the footsteps of the pioneers who braved the worst blizzard in a century to escape over the top of what’s now called Donner Pass through the Emigrant Gap northwest of Lake Tahoe.

Fifteen members of the original 81-member Donner Party left camp west of Truckee, along the current Interstate 80 on Dec. 16, 1846, but only seven — two men and five women — arrived at a settlement east of Sacramento 33 days later to fetch help for dozens of others.

Historians dubbed the escape party the Forlorn Hope, a term originally used to describe military missions with no realistic chance of success.

Unlike those who left Donner Lake that day on crude snowshoes with only wool blankets, an axe and scraps of dried meat, the four extreme athletes will have modern equipment and wilderness gear on the planned five-day hike. They’ll be tracked by live GPS signals at www.forlornhope.org when they begin today — 174 years to the day after their predecessors.

Tim Twietmeyer, five-time winner of the Western States 100-mile (160-kilometer) endurance run, and Bob Crowley, president of the International Trail Running Association, have been running backcountry trails more than four decades. They’ll be joined by ultrarunners Jennifer Walker Hemmen and Elke Reimer.

Crowley, who lives near Sacramento, became intrigued by the journey when he read a novel about the pioneers best known for eating the flesh of their dead companions to stay alive. The more he learned, the more convinced he became that cannibalism was but a footnote of a bigger story about “perseverance, passion and grit.”