I've read about that. I have a book from the early 1960's that details the history of Donner Pass from from pre-white man to 1963 or 1964. There are pictures of the Donner Summit/US40 bridge and various plows/blowers in 16-25' of snow.
It's interesting to note that in '52 "I-80" thru California was US40; it was a 2-lane, and was twistier than current I80. From what my parents told me, imagine 2-lane US50 from Pollock Pines to Meyers.
Exactly! Imagine the 2-lane stretches of present US50 to Tahoe without the modern passing lanes, as it was in the 1950's. US40 from Roseville, over Donner Pass, on to Reno, was identical to US50 in design, grades, limited line-of-sight.
Some pix from the Donner Summit Historical Society:
That region was my 'back yard' when I was a kid. Family week at Camp Sacramento, a week at the Boy Scout camp at the far end of Echo Lake, relatives with a cabin and speedboat on Donner Lake. As a teen I worked at Donner Lake Trading Post one summer,
and daily hitched rides to go up and watch the heavy equipment where the new I80 route was being blasted out of the granite mountain. You can't imagine the screeching of a crawler pulling a scraper on freshly blasted granite, leveling a haul path and moving material downhill to make a fill.
A couple of years later I was up and down US40 weekly, working with a survey crew in Squaw Valley and laying out the pioneer road into what would become Alpine Meadows. As I recall the US40 grade from Donner Lake up to the summit needed to be climbed mostly in second gear and definitely needed a lower gear to descend safely. Real slow if you were behind a truck, either direction. This is what those plows kept open to serve the 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics.
