In Addition

Reflections on the Truckee River

The Truckee River hitches the high country to the high desert. It begins in Lake Tahoe, spills through the dam at Fanny Bridge in Tahoe City, rambles briefly westward past the Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley ski areas, then curls east at Truckee and slithers down the dry eastern face of the escarpment into Truckee Meadows, where Reno lies. From there, the river runs northeast to its terminus in Pyramid Lake. Like the bass drum in a musical ensemble, the 105-mile-long Truckee is the steady backbeat in the exotic composition of this section of the Sierra Nevada.

The Truckee’s origins date back to the origins of Lake Tahoe, itself the product of faulting and glaciation. In that long-ago era the river fell out of Tahoe into the massive Lake Lahontan, which covered vast expanses of northeastern Nevada. Remnants of the ancient lake include Pyramid Lake and Lake Winnemucca, which dried up in the 1930s.

The river, reportedly, was named for an Indian guide called Truckee, or Chief Truckee, who led grateful emigrants through the Sierra via the river canyon in the 1840s. That Truckee River route was briefly abandoned after the disastrous Donner expedition, was later revived, and its preeminence was cemented when tracks for the Central Pacific Railroad were laid in the river canyon. The canyon now harbors a section of I-80, the main highway through the northern Sierra Nevada.

As you would expect, the river was essential to the mining legacy of the Reno-Tahoe area. Water from the Truckee was used to facilitate mining operations on the Comstock Lode in the 1850s and 1860s. Timber harvested from the slopes around Tahoe floated down to the Comstock mines in flumes that ran with water diverted from the lake and river. Water levels were adversely affected by mining activity, the watershed degraded by lumbering, and accumulations of sawdust clogged both natural and man-made waterworks. The Truckee was also diverted into irrigation ditches, which watered ranchland in the Washoe and Carson Valleys, and was dammed to supply power to burgeoning towns and cities.

The river did fight back, flooding the Truckee Meadows on a number of occasions. Swollen by rainfall and/or snowmelt, it breached its banks and inundated portions of the Reno-Sparks metropolitan area repeatedly. Dams and reservoirs throughout the watershed were constructed in the twentieth century (Prosser, Stampede, and Martis among them), sequestering water for agriculture and hydroelectric power, and also helping with flood control. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the river was subject to a major flood mitigation project that included construction of channels to control flows through Reno and neighboring Sparks. Still, the Truckee would not be contained.

Growing awareness of the environmental damage being caused by interruptions in the Truckee’s flow, along with the implementation of the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other environmental protections in the late 1970s, led to restoration efforts that are ongoing. These days the Truckee flows with relative freedom, with the health of the lakes at either terminus benefitting, as well as wildlife, ecosystems, and tourism along the river’s length.