Virginia City, Nevada

The Silver State’s origin story is full of character and characters

BY SCOTT LIEN

Like the 1960s TV series “Bonanza,” Virginia City, Nevada, is built on a storyline of colorful characters and settler lore that few mile-high cities can compete with. The lore is best enjoyed during lively saloon banter, while the characters were the throngs of hard-scrabble miners, speculators, and developers who flocked to the region beginning in 1859 to stake claim in the now infamous Comstock Lode. The sparkle of precious metals caught the eyes of folks in Washington, D.C., as well; within a few short years, the fledgling territory was on its way to becoming the Silver State. Virginia City’s present-day charm is built on its rough and rugged past, made famous by Henry T. Comstock, Mark Twain, George Hearst (father of media mogul William Randolph Hearst), and countless other treasure hunters. Travelers of all ages and interests will enjoy this high desert destination.

Stay

For an immersive Virginia City experience, stay at the Tahoe House Hotel and Bar which, according to legend, was home to Mark Twain. A former boarding house, this Victorian-style 16-room boutique inn features wellappointed guest rooms, period antique furnishings, and locally sourced guest amenities. Proprietor Paul Hoyle and his team offer a friendly and personalized experience, giving recommendations for local activities. The Tahoe House also offers the only public balcony on the main street — perfect for enjoying a sunrise coffee, or one of the bar’s specialty cocktails in the glow of a western sunset ($139 and up, tahoehousehotel.com).

Eat

The Virginia City Mexican Kitchen serves up rustic taqueriastyled dishes for a quick and satisfying meal. The diminutive café also proudly boasts the best churros on the planet (775-583-6039). For more of a linger, enjoy live music on the patio and local artists’ work on the walls at The Canvas Café (thecanvascafenv. com). For a craft beer or a late afternoon cocktail — as well as a million-dollar view — head to the legendary Bucket of Blood Saloon (bucketofbloodsaloon. com). And for dinner, make a reservation at Café del Rio, where inventive southwestern cuisine mixes with American comfort food like Gospel Fried Chicken or house-made chili relleno. Don’t pass on the seriously decadent apricotancho chili cheesecake (cafedelriovc.com).

Play

The town’s population swells on weekends with plenty of familyfriendly activities drawing lively crowds. A robust year-round events calendar attracts more than a million visitors a year to take in one of many festive parades, car shows, motorcycle gatherings, and legendary races (who knew racing camels and outhouses were such popular sports?). A high ratio of saloons to people makes bar crawls another popular attraction. Families and history buffs can enjoy riding the rails of the

Virginia & Truckee Railroad or ghost hunting in one of the town’s popular haunts (virginiatruckee.com).

See

For a small town, Virginia City has a lot to see. Poke around the hilly streets and admire the Victorian-styled mansions and historic sites, or take in the sights and sounds of the once bawdy and bustling main street boardwalk, where saloons seem to outnumber residents. What isn’t visible are the hundreds of miles of tunnels under the street. The Ponderosa Saloon and Mine Tour delivers on the promise of “underground mining exhibits,” which, as the dry-witted guide notes, generate more revenue than the mine ever did (775-8477210). The Chollar Mine, by contrast, yielded an estimated $17 million in silver and gold during its 80 years of operation, and its tour offers an authentic historic experience (chollar-minetour. com). Attracted to paranormal activity?

The Washoe Club Saloon has guided ghost tours and overnight investigations (thewashoeclubmuseum. com/saloon), while docents at the Mackay Mansion will introduce the current “residents” of Nevada mining legend John William Mackay’s former home (therealmackaymansion.com).

For more on Virginia City, go to visitvirginiacitynv.com.

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When the seven basin states signed the Colorado River Compact in 1922 to codify the division of water rights for agriculture and economic development, the agreement included no environmental protections. It also excluded from negotiations the many Indigenous People living along the Colorado including the Mojave, known as the “river keepers” who, in addition to practicing floodplain and irrigation agriculture, had been environmental stewards of the river for some 4,000 years. Even during the dam-building boom on the Colorado and elsewhere, very little attention was given to the potential impact that dams would have on the river’s ecology and on fish.

But after World War II, things began to change. In a booming postwar economy, people could afford cars, which they drove to visit natural places. More people began to recognize the costs of environmental negligence, including air and water pollution. In A Sand County Almanac , published in 1949, Aldo Leopold, whom some would call the father of wildlife conservation in the United States, wrote that maintaining the “beauty, integrity, and health of natural systems” is a moral and ethical imperative.

Many people who described themselves as conservationists began to move toward political action, and increasingly their energies became focused on river protection. A particular target of their ire emerged in the 1950s: the Colorado River Storage Project, a proposal by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to build a series of new dams in the Colorado River basin. A central feature of this project was going to be a 529-foot-high gravity dam on the Green River, a major tributary of the Colorado, to be built in an area known as Echo Park located inside Dinosaur National Monument, which spans the border between Utah and Colorado.

The Echo Park Dam would have flooded a scenic canyon flanked by enormous sandstone cliffs, as well as much of the Green and Yampa River valleys inside the national monument. Conservationists warned of devastating ecological consequences. But the Dinosaur National Monument was a remote part of the national park system that few people had visited, and some wondered why the area was deemed so valuable, especially since the dinosaur fossils that had been excavated there were not in danger of being flooded.

So conservationists set out to build public support for their case, and did so by enlisting the help of influential people such as Bernard DeVoto, a conservation writer who wrote an essay in the Saturday Evening Post called “Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?” Soon, coverage of the controversy popped up in major newspapers across the country.

Meanwhile, David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, made two films about Dinosaur National Monument and arranged for one of them to be screened frequently in the halls of the U.S. Congress. At a congressional hearing in early 1954, Brower also boosted the conservationists’ case when he showed how the dam engineers had made serious errors in their projections.

Following years of debate, the plans for Echo Park Dam were scrapped, with legislation signed by President Dwight Eisenhower paving the way for a campaign to establish a national wilderness preservation system. The conservation victory proved to be an important milestone in American environmental history, and many experts date the origins and emergence of a coherent “environmental movement” to the battle against the Echo Park Dam.

As dam building peaked in the 1960s, rivers and fish became a cornerstone of the environmental movement that emerged as a cultural and political force at the time. Of the 75 species listed under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, 22 were fish, including the Colorado pikeminnow. Coincidentally, in 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed Native Americans’ rights to Colorado River water and specified the allotments of tribes living adjacent to the river in southern basin states (although much of their allocation has gone unused because of insufficient funding and infrastructure). Then, in 1968, Congress established the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to protect sections of free-flowing rivers that “possess outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic, cultural, or other similar values.”

In the intervening 55 years, 209 rivers in the United States have been afforded this designation. But not the Colorado. Instead, a tug-of-war over water rights has continued along America’s most iconic river. Since 2000, annual flows in the Colorado River have averaged 20 percent below what they were in the century before, because of drought and climate change. Water in Lake Mead and the basin’s other artificial lakes dropped to such precipitously low levels last year that the federal government declared a first-ever official water shortage. There is reason to believe this will be the new norm.

Milk And Honey Wilderness

TODAY, WE LOOK at the dams on the Colorado River as permanent, almost natural features of the landscape. It is difficult to envision the river without them. The way the Colorado, and any river, behaves with the dams on it is, in a way, more real to us than what it would have been without them. We cannot envision the river in its natural state. No living person has seen the Colorado River fully wild.

It is easy to imagine that people who were there when the dams on the Colorado and other American rivers were built also viewed them as permanent features of the landscape. The dams were seen as engineering marvels, indestructible, and meant to last in perpetuity. We know that little thought was given to the impact of dams on fish and the ecological functions of the river; the public was instead transfixed on the economic and technological progress that dams represented.

By 1940, hydropower provided 40 percent of America’s electricity supply, and over the next couple of decades dams continued to be built at a rapid pace in the United States. But things changed as oil and natural gas production became cheaper, surpassing coal as the leading energy source, while new forms of energy also emerged, including nuclear power. By the 1960s the hydropower boom was ebbing, in part because many of the rivers suitable for exploitation had been dammed by then.

It had also become obvious that hydropower plants were, in fact, not indestruc- tible, but would eventually run into problems requiring costly rehabilitation. Reservoirs silt up, resulting in diminished energy outputs, and infrastructure needs to be repaired to avoid potential catastrophes. The environmental damage that dams inevitably caused was often greater than initially acknowledged. The cost of upgrading their safety systems or keeping outdated hydroelectric equipment running decades after a dam had been installed was, in some cases, not worth it. And so, by the 1980s, an idea began to spread that perhaps some dams should be removed.

Since then, the U.S. has led the world in dam removal. No new large hydropower dams have been constructed in this country for decades, and many dams considered obsolete have been taken out, including two large ones that were removed on the Elwha River in Washington State beginning in 2011.

Observers have learned that, once dams are taken out, the rivers often bounce back to their natural state more quickly than expected. Ecological rewards can be almost instantaneous, with migrating fish populations returning to their native habitats in very little time. Assisted by the same human hand that once altered it, nature is capable of rapidly and naturally regenerating what was once believed to have been permanently lost.

Recently, amid the Colorado water crisis, a longstanding campaign to drain Lake Powell by removing Glen Canyon Dam has gained some momentum. The idea is to store that water in Lake Mead instead. Taking out a structure that is a key component of one of the most complex river resource developments in the world may seem unrealistic to most people. But there is no harm done in imagining how the river would respond to such an undertaking. Perhaps it could be brought back to some semblance of its former majesty?

After all, people have shown it is possible, if only temporarily. We did it on March 23, 2014. On that day, the gates of Morelos Dam, on the U.S.-Mexico border, were opened to release a “pulse flow” of water into the final, parched stretches of the Colorado River, an engineered discharge that culminated from years of negotiations between the United States and Mexico.

By taking 105,000 acre-feet of water from