Nevada lake poised to become restoration story
RENO, Nev. – People driving between Reno and Las Vegas probably won’t notice anything unusual as they pass Walker Lake, located at the base of Nevada’s Wassuk Range in one of the least-populous counties in the United States.
But people who waited decades yearning for the lake to recover from its human-driven death spiral are marking a historic milestone.
On July 5, for the first time since Europeans settled the remote and scenic Walker Basin, there’s water flowing through the Walker River exclusively for the benefit of the lake’s fish and wildlife.
“It’s kind of a historical moment,” said Jeff Bryant, executive director of the Walker Basin Conservancy.
That’s because from 1936 until April 16, it was illegal for the federal water master, or anyone else, to move water through the Walker River for anything other than nourishing crops or cattle.
The Walker River Decree that established those restrictions didn’t include the health of fish, wildlife or people at Walker Lake among “beneficial uses” of Walker River water.
The result was that for 83 years, the only time river water flowed into the lake was when the Sierra Nevada winter produced so much snow at the headwaters farmers and ranchers in the valleys below couldn’t use it all.
That changed July 1 when a staffer at the Walker Basin Conservancy placed a water order with the federal water master who authorized an additional 7.75 cubic feet of water per second to pass through Bridgeport and Topaz reservoirs for the sole purpose of replenishing the lake.
“We are trying to make the river reliable again,” Bryant said. “It is something we talked about since I was a 10year-old kid.”
For the past 150 years, Walker Lake’s story was a story of two vital signs moving in the wrong direction.
Since 1868, the lake’s water level has been going down while the concentration of total dissolved solids went up.
That’s because the late 1800s is when newly arrived settlers began diverting Walker River flows mostly to power economic growth on farms and ranches in Nevada’s Smith and Mason valleys.
The diversions were great for raising cattle and crops along the river. But they were devastating for fish, wildlife and wetlands at the lake, which lost a reliable source of inflows.
“It was a real lifeline for that lake,” Bryant said of the river.
Walker Lake, like Pyramid Lake northeast of Reno, is what’s known as a desert terminus, or terminal, lake.
That means it’s located at a low point in a desert basin and has no natural outflows besides evaporation.
Terminus lakes can be healthy, vibrant places as long as they have steady inflows.
The problems happen when those inflows don’t arrive.
When water evaporates, the water vapor floats off into the air and the solid material gets left behind.
When there aren’t enough inflows to keep up with evaporation, the solid material concentrates and diminishes water quality.
As Walker Lake declined by about 150 feet from 1868 to 2018, the concentration of dissolved solids tripled.
The result was a slow, depressing decline in fish and bird populations accompanied by a decline in the overall aesthetics and vibe of the lake itself.
The additional water flowing to Walker Lake is just a fraction of what it’s going to take to restore it to vibrancy.