SALT LAKE CITY — When the first real bitter bite of winter comes to the Rocky Mountains, Kristin Johnson feels it. Feels it more than most.
It's not that Kristin has to physically contend with the snow and the cold. She's a librarian. She has a warm job and a car with a good heater that gets her to it. She spends a good deal of her time inside books and documents.
But sometimes it's books and documents that blow the coldest wind of all.
For Kristin and her chosen area of expertise, that is certainly the case.
She is one of the world's foremost authorities on the Donner Party.
"It's just about this time that people started dying," Kristin was saying this week as the calendar turned to mid-December and the temperature dropped to zero outside the Salt Lake Community College library, where she works.
She was reflecting back 163 years to December of 1846, when 81 men, women and children huddled next to a frozen lake on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas in northern California, as snowstorm after snowstorm blocked their way to the promised land.
They have become known collectively as members of the Donner Party, although there were several different families involved.
And the Donner Party has become synonymous with cannibalism, although not all of its members stayed alive by eating the remains of those who didn't.
About half of the Donner Party made it to springtime — but 100 percent of their awful story survived.
"It has a timeless appeal," says Kristin. "It's the universal story of the struggle to stay alive."
Kristin first became interested in the tragedy when she was a teenager growing up in Santa Rosa, Calif., only a few hours from the Sierras.
Later, after moving to Utah and earning a bachelor's degree in English at the University of Utah, she found herself working and studying at the libraries at both the U. and Brigham Young University.
Surrounded by excellent repositories of Western Americana, she indulged in Donner Party lore, eventually writing "Unfortunate Emigrants," an anthology of Donner Party documents that was published by Utah State University in 1996.
Now she has a Web site (utahcrossroads.org/DonnerParty) and a blog (donnerblog.blogspot.com), besides being in high demand as a consultant to authors and filmmakers and as a tour guide and commentator.
You name it, if it's about Donner, she knows more about it than you do.
She will tell you in great detail how the immigrants were still in Wyoming in July when they made the tragic decision to follow Lansford Hasting's advice and take his "shortcut" through the Wasatch Range and the salt desert in what is now Utah.
It took them two weeks of steady slashing and chopping to get from modern-day Henefer to the Salt Lake Valley, arriving with exhausted bodies, frayed nerves and worn out oxen on Aug. 22 — with the salt flats still to cross (and no Wendover buffets to greet them on the other side).
They didn't get to the base of the Sierras until Halloween, and at that they came this close to making it over the top. They were literally looking at the summit when the snows came that forced them back to the lake that today bears their name.
The first death by the lake came on Dec. 15 — 163 years ago this Tuesday.
The cannibalism came along later.
The Donner Party story is about ordinary people, Kristin stresses, ordinary people caught in an extraordinary mess. "It's something everybody can relate to," she says. "It makes you stop and think, 'What would I do?'
"It's easy when things are going great to feed and help others, but what about when feeding and helping others means you can't help your own family?"
Sometimes, at this time of year, she says she finds herself looking out the window at the cold and the snow and becoming emotional over what happened long ago to people she never met.
"I get this hopeless feeling and I choke up," she says. "I think of the children I know and then think of those children who had to walk through that snow — my gosh."
She lets the thought hang and shivers — even though it's safe and warm here in the library.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.