California-bound emigrants reached the Truckee River after crossing the Forty-Mile Desert and found their first life-saving drink of cold water, about three miles east of here near the point where I-80 crosses the river. Half dead and crazed with thirst, emigrants and animals staggered to the clear, cold water flowing from the Sierra Nevada, a welcome change from the alkali-tainted water they had been forced to drink for several hundred miles. This stretch of the California Trail along the Truckee marked a transition from relentless dust and heat to the last great challenge of crossing the Sierra Nevada. Following the Truckee River canyon was difficult, requiring wagons to ford the river more than 30 times along a rough route with steep banks and fast water before reaching the meadows near present-day Reno. Emigrants who had chosen the Carson River route at the beginning of the Forty-Mile Desert faced easier wagon travel, with only a few crossings and gentler terrain, and over time that route became the favored final approach to California. In 1849, Andrew Orvis recalled collapsing again and again on the sand, his tongue and lips cracked and bleeding from thirst, before finally reaching the water, drinking a little, and feeling better.