text: Riding hard for three days with your companions you cover a great deal of distance before finally catching up with Hastings and a large wagon party of a few hundred settlers on the shores of the great Salt Lake. By the time the four of you catch up with him you are all exhausted and your horses are close to collapse. Lansford Hastings is a strong-jawed man with a rapidly receding hairline and despite his note he is surprised to see you.
  
  
  While Charles Stanton and William Pike rest their horses you and James Reed trade your horses for two fresh ones from some of the settlers with Hastings and ride with him to the summit of a nearby mountain where Hastings explains the best direction to travel across the Canyon’s wooded slopes and promises to continue leaving messages. Reed is keen to ride ahead and get back to the Donner Party to get them moving along this but both Pike and Stanton’s horses are tired. Reed proposes to split up: he’ll ride ahead back to the Party while Stanton and Pike follow behind.
  
  
  What do you do?
  
  
   
  > You ride with Stanton and Pike
  Staying with Charles Stanton and William Pike you attempt to follow James Reed back to the Donner Party but unfortunately the three of you become lost in the Wasatch Mountains. For twelve days you wander through steep forested hills becoming increasingly worried as your food runs out until finally, when you are on the verge of killing your horses and eating them you encounter the wagons of the Donner Party and are enormously relieved. They have struggled to get across the Wasatch Mountains but have finally reached the Salt Lake Desert; as you and your companions feared you would run out of food in the mountains and starve you, Stanton and Pike are overjoyed to be back. Your odyssey was a sign of how dangerous it can be in the mountains. A few days after you return a tragedy befalls the group.
  
  
   