Donner Summit Tunnels

Tunnel 6, the Summit Tunnel, runs 1,659 feet through solid granite at the top of Donner Pass. Crews cut it between 1865 and 1867 with hand drills, sledgehammers, black powder, and later nitroglycerin, working four faces at once after a shaft was sunk from above to open the middle. On a good day they advanced about fourteen inches. Roughly twelve thousand of the fifteen thousand workers on the Sierra grade were Chinese, recruited from Guangdong and from California's own mining camps, and estimates of how many died here from avalanches, blasting, and exposure run from five hundred into the low thousands. Nobody counted properly at the time.

In June 1867 several thousand of them struck for higher pay and shorter shifts in the tunnels. Charles Crocker cut off their food and supplies. The strike broke after about eight days, though wages did rise later that year.

The first train ran through in 1868. The railroad kept the line until 1993, when it moved traffic to a longer tunnel a mile south, and the old bore has been open to anyone willing to walk it ever since: cold, dark, graffitied, with snow sheds and stone retaining walls the crews laid alongside. Bring a real flashlight. The land is railroad property and the footing is rough. Donner Memorial State Park is downhill to the east.