Yesterday morning, a line of vintage cars pulled out of the Historic Auburn Courthouse at 10 a.m. and climbed Old Highway 40 toward a concrete arch that has been standing at the top of Donner Summit since 1926. A few miles up Donner Pass Road, a different crowd is still there right now, finishing up a weekend on bikes built for a jump line that only exists because the chairlifts are shut down for the season. Neither group planned around the other. The Donner Summit Association's own weekly bulletin listed both events back to back, one line after the next, with no acknowledgment that they were happening the same weekend within a few miles of each other.
That's not an oversight. It's how the calendar up here actually works. Soda Springs doesn't have a parks department or an events office deciding what happens when. What happens is whatever outside group notices a piece of dormant infrastructure and decides to use it. A car club adopts a bridge nobody drives across for the drive itself anymore. A mountain bike trials society adopts a lodge that's only busy five months of the year. A soup kitchen moves into a spare room at the post office. If you live here, this weekend is a good excuse to notice the pattern, because it showed up twice in the same 48 hours.
The bridge nobody drives across anymore
The Donner Summit Memorial Bridge, better known as Rainbow Bridge, turned 100 years old yesterday, and the California Lincoln Highway Association marked the occasion with a free driving tour and a rededication ceremony. The tour left the Historic Auburn Courthouse at 101 Maple Street at 10 a.m. and followed the old Lincoln Highway route up over the summit. The ceremony itself started at 2 p.m. right at the bridge for anyone who skipped the drive from Auburn.
The bridge earned the celebration on engineering terms as much as sentimental ones. When it opened in 1926, it was the first structure of its kind to combine a compound curve with a continuous grade, replacing a stretch of the original Lincoln Highway so steep it had scared off drivers for years. It's been photographed for car commercials and appeared in at least one Hollywood film since. Trey Pitsenberger of the CLHA put it simply in the association's own announcement: "After 100 years, the Donner Summit Memorial Bridge continues to welcome travelers with its beauty and historical significance."
For most of us who live near it, the bridge is a thing we cross without thinking, on the way to somewhere else. Yesterday it got treated as the destination, which is worth doing at least once even if you've driven over it a thousand times.
The ski hill's second life
Two miles from the bridge, Donner Ski Ranch spends its summers being something other than a ski resort. This weekend it's hosting Crumble + Hard Head, a mountain bike trials event for serious riders sponsored by the Sacramento Pacific International Trials Society, running from 11 a.m. yesterday through 4 p.m. today.
The resort has quietly built an entire off-season identity around people who show up for reasons that have nothing to do with snow. Its Old 40 Bar and Grill stays open seven days a week year-round, and it's become something of an institution for Pacific Crest Trail thru-hikers passing through, who can claim a complimentary 40-ounce beer if they're 21 or older, along with beds, showers, and laundry. There's disc golf on the mountain for anyone who wants it. None of that is what Donner Ski Ranch was built for. It's what the ski hill turned into once someone figured out what else the building and the land were good for between snow seasons.
Here's what lands on the summit this particular weekend, side by side:
| Event | When | Where | Who's running it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rainbow Bridge 100th Anniversary | Sat, Aug 22, driving tour departs 10 a.m., ceremony at 2 p.m. | Donner Summit Memorial Bridge (Old Highway 40) | California Lincoln Highway Association |
| Crumble + Hard Head | Sat, Aug 22, 11 a.m. through Sun, Aug 23, 4 p.m. | Donner Ski Ranch | Sacramento Pacific International Trials Society |
What's actually changed on the ground this month
If you've been avoiding Old Donner Summit Road along the north side of Van Norden Meadow because of construction, that's over. The road has been regraded, the railroad crossing rebuilt, and it's been open to through traffic in both directions for several weeks now.
What isn't reopening any time soon is Rattlesnake Canyon Road, known on maps as Forest Road 85, running north from Cisco Grove. That route closed in 2024 for construction at Fordyce Dam and is expected to stay closed for four years, so anyone who used to loop through there needs to keep routing around it for a while yet.
There's also active forestry work centered on Summit Station, roughly bounded by Cascade, Pahatsi, and Kidd Lake Road to the north and Soda Springs Road to the west, part of a forest health and wildfire resilience project. Trails inside that footprint are closed while the work continues, and the Truckee Donner Land Trust has posted a map of the closure area for anyone planning a hike or a ride in that direction.
A soup shop moves into the post office
The newest business on the summit didn't build a storefront. Summit Soups shares a building with the Soda Springs post office at 21719 Donner Pass Road, and it's been serving soup made from scratch since a soft opening back in May. The hours have drifted since then, sliding from a noon-to-6 window on Thursdays through Sundays toward more of a dinner crowd, and you'll know it's open by the neon sign visible from the road and a handwritten hours card taped in the window. Word so far has been favorable.
It's a small thing, but it fits the same pattern as the bridge and the bike event. Nobody built Summit Soups a dedicated space. It found a spare room in a building that already existed for something else and made it work.
Even the town's governance runs this way. The Donner Summit Association, the volunteer nonprofit that puts out the weekly bulletin and organizes most of what passes for civic life up here, doesn't have its own building either. Its board has met at a private residence in Sugar Bowl, at Soda Springs Mountain Resort, and this month at the Nancy O Gallery and Glass in Soda Springs. The association is also looking to hire a part-time administrative assistant, roughly 10 hours a month, which tells you a lot about the scale everything up here runs at.
What's next on the calendar
Once the bikes clear out this afternoon, the summer's remaining fixtures are already on the books:
- September 19 and 20: Donner Party Hikes, seven separate hikes around Donner Summit built around the area's history, one per day, registered through the Donner Party Hike organization.
- September 26: SummitFest, the Donner Summit Association's annual benefit at Soda Springs Mountain Resort, with live music, food, drinks, and an auction.
SummitFest is the closest thing the calendar has to an event that actually belongs to the summit rather than being borrowed by an outside group, and even that one runs out of a resort building that spends most of its year closed. That's the honest version of how a town this small keeps a full calendar. Nobody up here is running a tourism board. People just keep finding uses for what's already standing.
If you're weighing what a place like Soda Springs actually offers day to day, beyond the obvious winter draw, this is closer to the real picture: a community held together by borrowed buildings, volunteer hours, and outside groups who keep finding reasons to come back. If you ever want to talk about what that means for buying or selling property up here, Doug Schroeder knows this stretch of the mountain block by block. Let's Connect.
