The America's National Parks Podcast is sponsored by L.L. Bean.

This year, L.L. Bean is joining up with the National Park Foundation,

the official non-profit partner of the National Park Service to help you find your happy place in an amazing system of more than 400 national parks including historic and cultural sites, monuments, preserves, lakeshores, and seashores

that dot the American landscape,

many of which you'll find just a short trip from home.

L.L. Bean is proud to be an official partner of the National Park Foundation.

Discover your perfect day in a park at find your park.com. In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in California, and people from all over the United

States packed their belongings and began to travel by wagon to what they hoped would be a new and better life.

Since most of these pioneers began their exodus to California in 1849,

they're affectionately referred to as the 49ers.

Yep, that's over the Sierra Nevada to the gold fields of California.

It was important to leave Salt Lake City and cross the desert before snow began to fall in the

Sierras making them impassable. Only a couple of years before a group of

pioneers called the Donner Party was trapped by a storm, an event that became one of the greatest human disasters of that day and age.

The stories of the Donner Party were still fresh on everyone's mind,

when a group of wagons began their journey in October of 1849.

It was much too late to cross the Sierra Nevada safely, and it looked like the wagons were

going to have to wait out the winter in Salt Lake.

It was then that they heard about the Old Spanish Trail,

a route that went around the south end of the Sierras

and was safe to travel in the winter. But no pioneer

wagon trains had traversed this route and they could only find one person in

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