Looking out the window at the blizzard conditions, I wondered if this was how the Donner Party felt.

Snow fell at my family’s Truckee cabin unrelentingly for days. In a matter of 48 hours there was eight feet of snow stacked against our home. I thought about the stranded pioneer party – how did they feel when they realized they didn’t have enough food? Did they panic before they sent an unfortunate few to trudge through the snowstorm to find help?

Our questions, thankfully, were a little more benign. Did my brother and I have the right equipment to make it out? Was there enough food and drinks to last us? And with all these important questions, my snow tires’ treads were running a little thin.

I realized that their situation might have been a little different. With nearly four months stuck in blizzard conditions and only their thin tents to protect them from the snow, the nearly 90-person party lost almost half their group to the harsh conditions.

Our only foreseeable problems were if the hot tub shorted out and, in a worst-case scenario, whether or not we would have to sacrifice our overweight pug, Chopper – but that’s OK, we have two dogs.

And we had no promised land to make it to, no thoughts of gold rushes or new lives. We had weeks to burn before we needed to be anywhere. Mixed feelings of being stranded and complete complacency was the best way to describe our mindset.

This mindset settled in after a day of skiing at Homewood mountain resort on the west side of Lake Tahoe earlier in the day. The storm blew in right over our heads from the west. Skiing in light jackets over T-shirts in the morning, we were what the locals call “storm trooping” by the end of the day.

A whitish-gray cloud engulfed our side of the mountain and, within a few hours, we were blasted by gusting winds that pushed the wind chill beyond freezing. We witnessed the entire lake change from a crisp blue reflection to a sullen gray right in front of us.

No longer was it enjoyable to battle flying ice and ride high on icy, bouncing chair-lifts. By the end of the day, it seemed as if the lifts were ready to quit before we were.

Almost frozen to the seats of the lift, my brother and I rode up for one last-ditch effort to slide down the mountain when the power quit on the lift, leaving us five feet above the ground. Fortunately, we were low enough to drop off into soft powder.

With all these beautiful conditions, it was a surprise we were so ready to head back to our warm cabin. The fireplace seemed like the best place to be before the weather turned bad – as it would.

When we returned to the cabin, we relaxed and enjoyed the few provisions we were able to pick up on the way back from the slopes. The news said that this could be the worst storm in the early year and the worst of years past.

Even as the snow piled, my brother and I could care less – we were in it for the long haul. Like the Donner Party, we had no choice.

Interstate 80 froze over like the Donners’ pass through the Sierras, blanketing in too much snow for Caltrans to handle. It looked as if we had no window to leave in the worst-case scenario for a full week, but best case we would be leaving by the early weekend.

There was something about not being able to go anywhere and not having anywhere to go that mixed so well. Snow seemed almost adventurous, not like too much rain. How often do a couple of Southern California residents end up getting snowed-in for a few days before weeks of obligation?

Rain could only dampen us to a point; it was adventure being stopped cold by the elements. However long it took the storm to pass over us in the high Sierra Nevadas, we had the food, beer, entertainment and careless attitude to brave the storm.

It turned out to only be a couple of days before a snowy window gave enough time for the crews to clear the highway. And unlike the Donner Party, living on boiled cowhide and each other until the rescue crews made their way up the mountain, I believe I could have handled a few more weeks stuck in the snow with nowhere to go.

-This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.