Truckee River West

West of Reno the Truckee River comes down out of the mountains, young and fast. Here it runs through the canyon from the California line past Verdi, draining Lake Tahoe and gathering force as it drops toward the valley—the route the Central Pacific followed over the Sierra and the emigrants struggled up on their way west. This upper stretch fed the sawmills of Verdi and Crystal Peak with water and log drives, and its grade gave the railroad its hardest Nevada climb. The river that arrives as a Sierra torrent will cross the desert and die in Pyramid Lake.

What the plaque says

Native Americans settled for thousands of years in the Truckee Valley. Their camps were on these flats near the river. They used fish blinds near here and left petroglyphs on boulders in the area. The Truckee River runs from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake, and was first discovered by Captain John C. Frémont in January 1844. The Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party in 1844 also followed the Truckee River into the Sierra, and crossed the mountains via Donner Pass. Two years later, the ill-fated Donner party rested in the Truckee Meadows, at present Reno, but they tarried too long and were caught by the Sierra snows. Despite the Donner tragedy, many emigrant trains to California, particularly from 1849 until 1852, traversed the Truckee route. In 1868, the Central Pacific Railroad followed the Truckee’s course. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the surrounding meadows echoed with the heavy exhausts of the giant Southern Pacific, cab-ahead, articulated, steam locomotives. During the same period, the Emigrant Trail, and the early toll roads, were developed into the Lincoln and Victory highways, and then into U.S. 40 and 1-80, today’s freeway.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 6.7 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 — 21 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 — 21 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 — 22 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

• The Great Train Robbery — 2.8 mi
• Verdi — 3.1 mi
• Governor Emmet Derby Boyle — 5.0 mi
• Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery — 6.5 mi