The Basin With No Drain, Water and Survival in the Great Basin Desert

In most of the country, water follows a reliable path. Rain falls, collects in rivers, rivers flow to the sea. The Great Basin does not work that way.

Here, water comes in and does not leave. It sinks into the ground, pools in alkaline flats, evaporates under a sun that takes the moisture back before it can go anywhere useful. The explorer John C.

Fremont named the region in the eighteen forties when he understood, from his maps and his travels, that the rivers here have no outlet to the ocean. He called it the Great Basin, and the name stuck because it described the essential fact. Nevada is the driest state in the continental United States.

Average annual precipitation statewide runs to about nine inches, most of it falling as snow on the mountain ranges rather than in the valleys where people live. The mountain ranges themselves matter enormously. Ninety percent of Nevada's water supply comes from snowpack.

The ranges charge the aquifers. They feed the rivers, the Truckee, the Carson, the Walker, the Humboldt, that have sustained every human community in the state since the first people arrived twelve thousand years ago. The Humboldt River runs east to west across the top of the state for about three hundred thirty miles and ends at the Humboldt Sink, where it simply stops.

No delta, no estuary, no sea. The water spreads across the flats and disappears. Wagon train emigrants in the eighteen forties followed it desperately across what they called the worst stretch of the whole journey, and then found it abandon them at the worst possible moment, with the Sierra still ahead.

Walker Lake, in Mineral County, was once full enough to support a substantial fishery and a Paiute people who had depended on it for centuries. Since eighteen eighty-two, upstream irrigation diversions have dropped its level by about one hundred eighty feet and increased its salt concentration to the point where it can no longer support fish. The lake is still there.

It is just no longer living in the way it once was. In Nevada, water is everything. There has never been enough of it.