Mid-Summer. Look closely and you can see the lights in the Salt Lake Valley beginning to flicker on. Donner Park, by the way, was named in honor of the ill-fated Donner party, who, upon receiving some bad advice from a scout, pushed their wagons up a steep hill to avoid the mud at the base of what is now called “Emigration Canyon” (named for the mormons who came after). Speculation has it that if the Donner party hadn’t lost several weeks going up that hill, they would have missed the bad weather in the Sierras, and would have therefore been but a mere footnote in the history of the west.