Brian Erickson

A small plane sneaks across the Canadian border and drops off a package to a waiting DEA agent. Inside is a million dollars in cash and cocaine, stolen from one of the biggest drug kingpins in the country. A death warrant is issued for whoever gets pinned with its theft. A man, in order to clear up the legal claims against the company he has bought, must travel to a desolate island accessible only by plane. He charters the wrong plane with the wrong pilot to the wrong place. All in all, he embarks on a bad trip.

A grim incident from American pioneer history is recreated as a determined group of settlers, facing almost insurmountable odds, struggles to reach California in 1846. Already divided by internal dissension over the choice of a leader and the selection of a route, the wagon train is soon decimated by Indian raids, a scarcity of food and water, and the unrelenting forces of nature. Finally after months of hardship, the party reaches the High Sierras, only to be stranded in the middle of the pass by an early snowstorm. And as fear of an agonizing death from starvation forces the abandonment of conventional rules of human behavior, the pioneers face a new enemy - each other.

An innocent fugitive from the law lives in the wilderness with a grizzly bear companion and helps passers-by in the forest.