Friday, March 14, 2003 | 11:18 a.m.
HAWTHORNE -- Controversy is a constant at Walker Lake.
The same can't be said for its water level.
In a state where widespread drought threatens every last rivulet, Walker Lake is the sickest of the sick. It has dropped 140 feet in 120 years.
Ongoing drought combined with ongoing irrigation upstream has prevented the lake from receiving any water the past two years, bringing it to its lowest level in recorded history.
Salty sediments foul the water, and fish struggle to survive, rocking a food chain that attracts thousands of migratory birds each year and endangering the tourism that keeps Mineral County's economy afloat.
Those desperate to save Walker Lake say something must be done to curb the amount of river water used to irrigate Lyon County farms upstream because Walker River offers the lake its only source of fresh water.
But seven generations of Lyon County ranchers and farmers have made their living by irrigating from Walker River. They produce a fifth of Nevada's total agricultural yield.
Walker River Paiute Indians, who live on a 324,000-acre reservation near Walker Lake's northern shore, are afraid of losing the largest tangible piece of their culture's history. Their tribe originated along the shores of the lake and on Mount Grant, which towers above the lake to the east.
Mineral County needs the lake tourism that provides 40 percent of its economic base.
Lyon County ranchers need to preserve the only work and way of life they've ever known.
The Paiutes need to preserve what's left of their history.
Biologists and environmentalists say they need to save the lake's fish for the huge flocks of migrating birds that feed on them.
All agree that Walker Lake -- and its ability to support these needs -- is drying up.
But they don't agree on a solution.
A pair of yearslong court disputes and recently started private mediation among ranchers, state and federal water- and land-management officials, the Walker River Paiute Indians and environmentalists have done little more than air complaints and make everyone edgy.
Do they rewrite a private irrigation agreement that has served the farmers for nearly 100 years? Do they start over with crops that use less water than the current staples: alfalfa, onions and garlic? Would such a switch save Mineral County's tourism only to devastate Lyon County's agriculture industry?
Is it even possible to save a lake that nature may intend to dry up anyway?
Answers and solutions aren't clear or close.
Walker Lake, oblivious to man's controversies and a slave to nature's laws, continues to recede.
And Nevadans could see an entire lake disappear in their lifetimes.
Making waves
Lou Thompson is frustrated.
He first read about Walker Lake's demise in a 1993 newspaper article. That same year Thompson, a Hawthorne retiree whose family once irrigated farmland upstream, founded Walker Lake Working Group. The nonprofit organization is dedicated to getting more fresh water for Walker Lake.
Ten years and two droughts later, Thompson's group is still fighting.
"If the lake doesn't get the water it needs this year, we're going to lose our fishery," Thompson said. "We're not just going to sit around and talk while the lake dries up."
Walker Lake is about 10 miles north of Hawthorne on the east side of U.S. 95. The expanse of water provides a welcome break for travelers weary of seeing nothing but rocky reds and brown mountains in every direction.
It's a place where quiet is broken only by the occasional boat motor or passing truck or the quacks and wing-flutter of ducks, grebes, loons and other water birds that bob on the lake's glassy surface.
Walker Lake is a remnant of the Ice Age Lake Lahontan, which once covered about 8,700 square miles. It is "terminal," meaning it has no natural outflow. Most lakes have some natural outlet, but Walker Lake doesn't. Water flows in from the Walker River and evaporates at a rate of about 4 feet a year.
As the water evaporates it leaves behind minerals called "total dissolved solids." This salty residue will rise on its own in a terminal lake, but without a regular influx of fresh water the total dissolved solids (TDS) rise more quickly.
The higher the TDS level, the more unsuitable the lake is for fish. Only the Lahontan cutthroat trout and tui chub remain in what once was a legendary fishery.
"They used to take carp by the trainload to San Francisco," Shirley Thompson, Lou Thompson's wife, said. "They used to have a thriving perch population. This used to be the best perch fishery in the West."
State records say the Sacramento carp died off in 1948 when Walker Lake's TDS level reached 6,850 milligrams per liter. The Sacramento perch disappeared in 1963 when the TDS level reached 8,440.
Lahontan cutthroat trout and the tui chub it eats are hanging in. But last year, when TDS levels breached 13,000 parts per million (ppm), only 7 percent of the tui chub eggs hatched, Mike Sevon, a Nevada Division of Wildlife fish biologist, said. One of the three varieties of plankton the chub eat is gone.
"When you lose the basics of the food chain, you're in trouble," Thompson said.
Sevon was quoted in the newspaper article that first drew Thompson's attention to Walker Lake's problems in 1993. Sevon had written a report, "Walker Lake, 'An Endangered Ecosystem' How Much Time Is Left for the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout Fishery?"
At that time Sevon's projections showed the trout would die off by 2000. But that didn't happen because 1996 was the first of four consecutive good water years. The lake rose 14 feet in elevation, according an update Sevon wrote in 2000.
Ten years after his first report, Sevon is confident the fishery can recover with the right decisions about water conservation and a government fish-stocking program.
"We can go back. It's not irreplaceable," he said from his Fallon office in February. "But the lake is going to be declining beyond levels we've experienced in (modern) time, this year."
That's uncharted water, according to the biologist's 2000 update:
"Below the lake elevation of 3,940 feet, we can only guess when the fishery will collapse."
Walker Lake's elevation is currently about 3,940 feet.
Foundering tourism
Lahontan cutthroat trout are raised in two state-run fish hatcheries and stocked in Walker Lake. They are acclimated for a week in a mixture of half fresh water and half salinated lake water so Walker Lake won't shock them to death. The wildlife division dumps 200,000 trout into the lake each year.
The TDS levels, which were 13,800 ppm and rising in February, prevent trout from living much longer than three years, even though they are capable of living much longer. Fifty years ago, the fish thrived on their own. Anglers snagged trout weighing upward of 40 pounds.
These days, they're lucky to hook a 3 pounder. The winner of a February fish derby at Walker Lake's Cliff House Resort took the top prize with a trout that weighed less than 4 pounds.
Ed Jones, owner of Ed's Bait & Tackle store in Hawthorne, has heard all the fish stories. He leads guided fishing tours on the lake. He used to have competition from a tackle shop up the street, but it closed last year for lack of business.
During February's peak fishing season, Jones sat alone behind his counter lamenting the ones that got away.
"I was supposed to do a story with ESPN out there, but they canceled because there's no big fish being caught," he said.
Jones grew up in Hawthorne, moved away as a young adult and returned in the late 1980s. He opened his bait shop three years ago.
"This was a lifetime dream. I always wanted to be a tackle-store owner and to be a guide," Jones said. "Today I wouldn't open a tackle store without knowing what's going to happen to the lake.
"My total sales last year were a third of what they were three years ago," he said. "Last week I went into the bail-bond business just to pay the rent."
Unlike many other Western lakes, Walker Lake has no fees or boating restrictions. Fishing is best in winter because trout are active in cold water. They loll near the bottom in summer. Power boats don't disturb fishermen because there aren't many in summer.
Historically, the balance proved so popular that financially strapped Mineral County came to depend on lake tourism for nearly half its budget, said Ron Wolven, the Mineral County Economic Development Authority director.
But salty water corrodes boat motors and kills fish. One jet-boat competition already has taken its national contest elsewhere, Wolven said.
A proposed landfill in a former open-pit mine in northern Mineral County could create up to 75 jobs in the county of about 6,500 people. But it won't make up for lost tourism on Walker Lake.
That's going to take time. Many areas set aside for industry don't have such basic services as water or sewer. Developing new industries will take time.
"We need to do something to reinstate the lake level," Wolven said.
But no one seems to know what to do. Every solution means giving up something -- water for farms, water for the lake or reliance on new, relatively untested crops.
The last stop
Walker Lake is the last stop on Walker River, which starts as melting snow in California's mountains.
It tumbles from the canyons as two rivers -- East Walker and West Walker -- that merge into a single stream about seven miles outside of Yerington.
It fills two man-made reservoirs and countless irrigation ditches before rolling into a third reservoir on the Paiute Reservation at Schurz and finally into Walker Lake.
Those seeking to preserve the lake blame its depletion on decades of irrigation upstream for water-thirsty crops such as alfalfa.
Walker Lake only receives fresh water in flood years after the reservoirs, farmers and ranchers have received their allotments. Up to 130 percent of the river's water is spoken for, which means storing it and using ground water to make up anything beyond 100 percent.
Those rights are set out in an agreement drawn up by the Walker River Irrigation District, a private coalition founded in 1919 by the ranchers and farmers in the Mason and Smith valleys near Yerington. The agreement was revamped in the 1930s, but remains largely the same.
The original irrigation district members pooled their money and floated bonds to build Topaz Reservoir on the California-Nevada border and Bridgeport Reservoir in California.
Steve Fulstone's great-grandfather was one of those men. Almost 85 years later Fulstone kin still farm about 800 acres throughout Smith Valley.
Fulstone leases some of his land to people who grow onions and garlic. He raises horses -- jumpers. His wife competes. They hope to pass on the Fulstone ranching legacy to their two children.
But there's talk of changing what farmers should grow and of limiting the water use. Fulstone has tried cultivating some rice grass environmentalists recommended. But sweeping crop changes provide flimsy foundation for those whose retirement and children's college educations depend on farming.
"Everybody is very concerned about threats to their livelihood. It's human nature," Fulstone said.
Nevada Agriculture Department figures show Lyon County farmers produced about $54 million of Nevada's $356 million in agriculture in 1997, the most recent year for which figures are available. An agriculture official said he doesn't expect a change in that overall percentage when the 2002 census is finished.
Records also show 305 of the state's 2,829 farms are in Lyon County. Without Walker River water, Lyon County's economic staple would wither.
Farm life
Joe Landolt, 78, and his 69-year-old wife, Beverly, can't imagine life without alfalfa fields and farm work. It is all they have ever known. They own 440 acres outside Yerington, where they have raised two boys, three girls and tons of alfalfa. They're still raising alfalfa.
"We moved here into a house that didn't have any studs. Joe leveled every bit of this land with his own tractor," Beverly Landolt said.
"I could get on the tractor and ride it all day. I love it," Joe Landolt added. "I was brought up working hard with family and friends."
And it's work he still can do in a society that doesn't offer many lines of full-time work to a man pushing 80.
Lorna Weaver of the Nevada Wildlife Federation said grapes and rice grass, an alfalfa-like hay crop, use far less water and can thrive in such regions as the Mason and Smith valleys. But, she admits, these take time -- a couple of years at least -- to yield a profitable crop.
Landolt says he's not against growing a crop that uses less water.
But time comes mighty dear.
"You spend your whole lifetime just building up something," he said. "How do you change what you've done for more than 40 years?"
Walker River Paiutes are concerned about further change and devastation of a river system on which they have depended for about 4,000 years.
The tribe's native name Agai Ticutta, or "trout-eaters," is taken from the Walker Lake fish that provided sustenance. They called Walker Lake Agai Pah, or "trout lake," said Roy Hoferer of the tribe's cultural committee.
Members still perform the Ghost Dance and other religious ceremonies on its shore, as they have for generations. They consider the lake and mountains to either side holy lands from which their tribe originated.
"It has deep religious significance for us," Hoferer said.
What some see as a struggle between using the river or saving the lake, the Paiute see as one continuous system in peril, Hoferer said. As many 10,000 Paiutes once fished, lived and prayed along the Walker River and Walker Lake.
Walker Lake and its trout offered his ancestors the same kind of sustenance and cultural symbol that bison offered the American Indians of the Great Plains.
Being "trout eaters" means nothing if the fish and lake are gone.
"It's like when the plains people killed all the buffalo. It killed a whole culture," Hoferer said. "It's a really terrible thing."
Thirsty enemy
The Paiutes staged a four-day fast and prayer vigil at Walker Lake in September, hoping to purifying its waters and bring a solution.
But the ritual didn't eradicate one of the river's most thirsty enemies: an estimated 1,000 acres of tamarisk that lie at the southern edge of the reservation, just north of Walker Lake.
Tamarisk, or salt cedar, is a wispy tree-type shrub introduced to the West in the 1830s as an ornamental guard against erosion. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps planted it along river banks and shorelines, including Walker Lake's.
It has grown to be the bane of Western water conservation. Tamarisk thrives in the salty, alkaline soils of the high desert.
Tamarisk shares nothing. It consumes copious amounts of water that can be measured in gallons a day and has taproots 20 feet or deeper to suck up whatever groundwater it can find. Its leaves emit a salty residue, rendering soil around it too salty to support other desert plants and animals.
It produces prodigious amounts of tiny seeds that can be carried hundreds of miles. Uprooting a shrub will not kill the seeds, which will replant themselves. It grows aggressively. Sprouts literally start within hours from the trunks of severed tamarisk, even from trunks that have been sprayed with herbicides.
Killing these shrubs takes time and diligence. The tribe is working on it, Hoferer said, but the process is slow.
Critics say the government should figure out how much water is being lost on the Paiute reservation before it starts rationing upstream, and that issue is undoubtedly one being discussed in closed-door mediation.
Hoferer is among those who hope for a solution sooner rather than later.
"It's a travesty to see a whole river system die," he said.
Walker Lake's own history appears hell-bent. It is unclear whether Walker Lake's man-made problems are simply accelerating the inevitable. The lake has completely dried up twice in the past 4,700 years, according to a Nevada Division of Water Planning report.
"Even though strong arguments exist for the lake's restoration and preservation on recreation and environmental grounds, it is not certain whether the reduction in Walker Lake is due entirely to upstream agriculture diversions ... or whether Walker Lake's recession ... is part of an inevitable hydrologic cycle which has been admittedly accelerated upstream by agricultural diversions," the report says.
A dry past
The dry periods happened 4,700 and 3,600 years ago, and may have been caused when the Walker River changed direction during the same period.
The most recent time Walker Lake fell as low as it is now was in 1994 at the end of an eight-year drought. Nevada could be embarking on another one. A new University of Arizona study of tree-ring data shows the interior West may be in the middle of a prolonged drought, similar to ones that have happened over the past 750 years.
Mike Turnipseed, director of the state water planning division, placed a two-year deadline on the private mediation talks that started in January and happen monthly among the ranchers, state and federal agencies and activists involved.
Some fear Walker Lake won't survive the drought and discussions. And if the lake dries up, it may take Hawthorne with it.
"This whole town will die, and I'll be the first to go," Ed Jones said from the quiet of his bait shop, which should have had at least a customer or two during February's peak fishing season.
Still, Hawthorne residents continue planning the annual loon festival, which attracts 100,000 bird-watchers each April. As long as there are fish to eat, the loons will continue stopping at Walker Lake during their migration north.
It's hard to tell how much longer the fish will last. A 1972 study by the University of Nevada, Reno suggests Lahontan cutthroat trout die when TDS levels reach 16,000 ppm. Sevon said other research shows they might survive TDS levels as high as 19,000.
But that's guesswork. Other numbers are more definite. Walker Lake was 224 feet deep in 1882. It now is 90 feet deep and has lost 71 percent of its 1882 volume.
Through the window of his store Jones watched children cross Main Street on their way to school. If something doesn't stabilize the lake and the tourism it supports soon, the children who grow up and move away won't be able to follow their dreams home again like Jones did.
"Things have changed. There's no work here," he said. "If they're dumb enough to let Walker Lake die, this'll be a ghost town."
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