At Pyramid Lake

Introduction

1 � � L ocated in the sagebrush desert 35 miles north of Reno, Pyramid Lake is an unexpected expanse of water 30 miles long and roughly 4 to 11 miles wide. By scientific measurement its deepest point is 335 feet. In the imaginations of the lake’s many admirers, it is bottomless. Its color changes across the full visual spectrum of blue from violet to green. The principal source of Pyramid Lake’s water is the Truckee River, which flows 100 miles from Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada. Pyramid Lake has no outlet, and in many years more water evaporates than enters the lake; consequently, its water is slightly saline. Pyramid Lake is a remnant of Lake Lahontan, an inland sea that filled a large part of the Great Basin during the Pleistocene geologic era, 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago. The lake is home to two noteworthy fish, a bottom-feeding sucker known as cui-ui and Lahontan cutthroat trout (lct), a species of lake salmon. The cuiui , sacred to the Numa (Paiute), is an ancient fish found only in Pyramid Lake. Lahontan cutthroat trout, sought by sportfishermen, grow to more than four feet and can weigh up to forty pounds. Pyramid Lake is also remarkable for the many large tufa deposits that border the lake. Tufa is a rock that forms when springs beneath the lake surface discharge calcium that mixes with carbonate dissolved in the lake’s water. The calcium carbonate creates a reef-like formation. Since the rocks cannot grow above the level of the lake, geologists use them to measure the depth of the lake in the past. The immense tufa pyramid that gives the lake its English name and a smaller monolith that has broken into pieces resembling a seated woman covered by a shawl, with a round open container beside her, known as Stone Mother and Basket, are the most memorable works of nature at the lake. i have always thought that there should be a clock for Pyramid Lake, a clock similar to the one on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists indicating how close we are to the midnight (high noon?) of nuclear annihilation. The Pyramid Lake clock would be set at 11:45 in 1844, tick to 11:50 in 1905, tock Introduction Photomontage of John C. Frémont’s pyramid and the Mapes Hotel in Reno. The photo’s caption read in part: “Pyramid Lake’s Pyramid Is Larger by Far than Most People Believe.” Nevada State Journal, April 3, 1955, 26. Courtesy Nevada State Historical Society. Introduction 3 to 11:55 in 1967, surge to 11:59 in 1985, and fall back to 11:45 in 2013. Some old threats are still around, new ones continue to emerge, but some safeguards are in place. The lake provides its own chronology of decline in the bands of older dark and more recent white rock exposed as the water level drops. Photographs of the lake’s shore, and prominent features such as the pyramid, clearly reveal the nearly 100-foot lowering of the lake in the past century. The roughly 30-foot rise in the lake since the mid-1980s is harder to chart visually, except, perhaps, in the submerged picnic tables at Warrior Point. The pyramid has inspired other measurements. A photomontage appearing in the Nevada State Journal on April 3, 1955, placed the Mapes Hotel, at 12 stories then the tallest building in Nevada, against the 360-foot pyramid to provide a sense of scale. The original caption with the photo indicates that the reader may not realize how large the pyramid is. This, in turn, implies that many Nevadans and tourists knew the hotel better than they knew the lake and its pyramid. The photo promotes tourism to both the lake and Reno. But this seemingly simple pictograph may send other messages to receptive viewers. When I showed it to students in Professor William Rowley’s Native American history class at the University of Nevada, Reno, in April 2011, they perceived a “grandeur of nature over puny works of man” theme. Others noted that both the pyramid and the hotel lacked contexts. Absent from both newspaper and classroom discussion was the Paiute perspective. The Indians call the rock “wono,” a large overturned basket. In some legends the basket conceals a mermaid whose breath appears as steam from the rock’s...