did the donner party cross the salt flats in utah?

Hastings stayed at the fort to persuade travelers to turn south on his route. The fort - a scant supply station run by Jim Bridger and his partner Pierre Louis Vasquez - was in Blacks Fork, Wyoming. Hastings had not traveled any part of his proposed shortcut until early 1846, on a trip from California to Fort Bridger. He described a direct route across the Great Basin, which would bring emigrants through the Wasatch Mountains and across the Great Salt Lake Desert. To encourage settlers he published The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California. Hastings, an early emigrant, had gone to California in 1842 and saw the promise of the undeveloped country.

The trail generally followed rivers to South Pass, a mountain pass in Wyoming relatively easy for wagons to negotiate.From there, wagon trains had a choice of routes to their destination. Most wagon trains followed the Oregon Trail route from Independence, Missouri, to the Continental Divide, traveling at about 15 miles (24 km) a day on a journey that usually took between four and six months. Some, like Patrick Breen, saw California as a place where they would be free to live in a fully Catholic culture, but many were inspired by the idea of Manifest Destiny, a philosophy that asserted the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans belonged to Americans and they should settle it. During the 1840s, the United States saw a dramatic increase in pioneers: people who left their homes in the east to settle in Oregon and California.

Did the donner party cross the salt flats in utah?