Truckee River East

The Truckee River runs east of Reno here on the last leg of a singular journey. Unlike most rivers, it reaches no ocean: rising at Lake Tahoe, it crosses the Truckee Meadows and runs through the desert to empty into Pyramid Lake, a closed basin with no outlet. This eastern stretch carried emigrant trains toward the mountains, powered early mills, and now feeds the diversion that waters distant farms. Frémont followed it in 1844. The snowmelt that leaves the Sierra ends its run in the desert lake, feeding a fishery the Paiute have depended on since before the wagons.

What the plaque says

The Truckee River, seen below, runs from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake. The river’s first recorded discovery was by Captain John C. Frémont in January 1844. He camped by its terminal at Pyramid, and then followed it to the big bend at Wadsworth. Captain Frémont named the stream the Salmon-Trout River. At the end of his 1845 sojourn in Nevada, he followed it into the Sierra and crossed Donner Pass. Beginning with the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party in 1844, the Truckee River became a route for California emigrants until the advent of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1868-1869 brought the wagon train period to a close. After the Southern Pacific took over the railway in 1899 and relocated much of its Nevada alignment, the old Central Pacific roadbed between Sparks and Wadsworth was deeded to Washoe County in 1904 for road purposes. In 1917, the road became a portion of state road 1, which in 1920 became the Nevada section of the victory highway. In 1925, when federal highway names were replaced by a numerical system, the Victory Highway became U.S. highway 40. In 1958, after reconstruction, this route became the initial section of interstate 80 across Nevada. The river provides water for Reno, Sparks, the Fallon agricultural area and Pyramid Lake.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 13 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 17 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 18 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Sand Harbor — 31 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Derby Diversion Dam — 7.3 mi
• Southern Pacific Railroad Yards — 9.6 mi
• Chinese in Nevada — 9.6 mi
• Glendale School (1864- 1958) — 9.7 mi