The Truckee River's Journey: One Lake, One River, No Ocean
Near Tahoe City, California
Lake Tahoe has one outlet. Right here, at Tahoe City, there is a dam built in nineteen thirteen. Open the gates and water flows east. That water becomes the Truckee River.
The Truckee runs through the town of Truckee, crosses into Nevada, and after approximately one hundred twenty miles ends at Pyramid Lake, a closed-basin desert lake on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe's reservation. It does not reach the ocean. It never reaches the ocean. The Great Basin is called the Great Basin because water flows in and does not flow out.
In nineteen hundred and two, Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act, the first major federal irrigation project in the American West. Three years later, in nineteen oh five, a dam was built on the Truckee River at Derby, Nevada, and most of the river's flow was diverted south to irrigate farms in the Fallon area. The water that had been flowing to Pyramid Lake was redirected to farmland that white settlers were being encouraged to claim.
Pyramid Lake dropped, over the following decades, by roughly eighty feet. The Lahontan cutthroat trout, which spawned in the Truckee River and was the foundation of the Pyramid Lake Paiute people's fishery, went extinct in the river by the nineteen forties. A federal hatchery has been working on restoration since the nineteen seventies. Water rights litigation between the tribe, Nevada agricultural users, and California municipalities has been running in the courts continuously for decades.
The water that starts here at this dam, the water flowing out of one of the clearest lakes in the world, carries a political history all the way to a desert lake a hundred and twenty miles away.
