When Three-Fingered Jack McKinney's young son asks him to find his father, who abandoned him and his mother, Luke Jensen agrees to help the boy, but finds his good deed putting him in the middle of a deadly father-and-son reunion.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the High Sierras, but Smoke Jensen and his children, Louis and Denise, won't let a little snow stop them from heading to Reno for the holidays. There are two ways for them to get there: the long way, going around the Sierra Nevada Mountains, or the short way, going right through them. Smoke decides to take a gamble. They'll follow the trail that, decades earlier, brought the legendary Donner Party to...