🚀 go-pugleaf

Any amateur historians on these groups who know about (or 
maybe were involved in) the major fiber optic networks that 
run across Donner Pass in California? 

Reason for asking:  

Donner Pass has long been a major route for transportation and 
communication across the Sierras and into California for:

   --Native Americans over several centuries; 
   --Emigrants on the California Trail in the early 1840s 
   --Gold Rush fortune seekers in the late 1840s; 
   --First transcontinental railroad in the 1860s; 
   --First transcontinental highway in 1915-1925
      (the Lincoln Highway, later Highway 40); 
   --First transcontinental airline route in the 1920s;
   --Interstate 80 Freeway built for the Winter Olympics in 1960;
   --Major pipelines for petroleum products, beginning in 19??;

and most recently, Donner Pass is a major route for fiber optic cables 
connecting the U.S. to California and onward across the Pacific.  (For 
winter-time photos of 7 foot fiber optic route markers sticking out of 
the snow on a ridge above Donner Lake, cf. 
<http://www.stanford.edu/~siegman/fiber_optic_cables_donner_pass/>

There's an active Donner Summit Historical Society with a funky museum 
up on the summit, who might be interested both in learning more about 
these cables and maybe getting someone to talk about them at their 
annual Rendezvous, scheduled this year for August 13-14:

   <http://www.donnersummithistoricalsociety.org/>       
   <http://www.donnersummithistoricalsociety.org/pages/Newsletters.html>
<http://www.donnersummithistoricalsociety.org/pages/donnerpasshistrendezv
ous.html>

I'd be glad to be a transmission channel to this group, either via 
responses to this newsgroup or to siegman at stanford dot edu.