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Ever heard about The Donner Party that was lost in the High Sierras of California in 1846?

There are a couple of very good books about what really happened during that severe Winter. Read them when I was in high school. I hiked into that area when I was in my twenties and could not believe the isolation and deathly quiet near the site. This years severe Winter storms may have caused the Park Rangers in Donner Park to reflect back on what happened in 1846.

Over the next four months, the eighty-one remaining men, women, and children huddled together in two abandoned cabins*, make shift lean-tos, and tents. The cattle had all been killed and eaten by mid-December; one man had died of malnutrition. The people began to eat bark, twigs, and boiled hides.
In desperation, a group of nine men, five women, and a twelve year old boy packed scanty rations and on snowshoes made from oxbows and rawhide, set out to cross the pass for help. They called themselves the Forlorn Hope. Nine days later they realized they had become lost in the snow-covered mountains. Completely without food for three days and on the verge of starvation a suggestion was made to draw lots; the loser would sacrifice his life to save the others. Patrick Dolan drew the fatal slip, but no one could bring themselves to kill him. Malnutrition soon carried out what the group could not do. Two other men followed quickly. Ten members of the Forlorn Hope butchered their dead companions, then wrapped and carefully labeled the packages so no one would have to consume their relatives. The two Indians who had accompanied the group as guides refused the gruesome nourishment and vanished into the woods. (1)
* * * It took four relief parties two months to get all the survivors out. The second relief party, led by James Reed, reported that when they arrived at the camp, “half-eaten bodies” littered the ground and the survivors “surrounded by the remains of their unholy feast, looked more like demons than human beings.”

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(1) Native America Plains Tribes did not eat white folks who were coming across in covered wagons. They had millions of buffalo to feast upon and other wild game to eat. Kevin Costner got the history mostly correct in "Dances with Wolves" and won an Academy Award for his efforts.