- This time I'm exploring some of the scenery, communities, and history of the Walker Basin.

Travel with me from Yerington to Walker Lake.

That's all coming up right now on "Wild Nevada."

- [Announcer] Support for PBS Reno and "Wild Nevada" comes in part from the William N. Pennington Foundation.

Bill Pennington was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and gaming pioneer who built a legacy of community service in Nevada.

- [Narrator] And by Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation, Kristine Perry, Margaret Burback, Mark and Susan Herron, in memory of Sue McDowell, Lloyd Rogers and Gaia Brown, Stanley and Neila Schumaker, and by individual members.

(bright gentle music) (upbeat bright music) - Hi, I am Chris Orr, and I'm starting this trip in Yerington, Nevada.

Yerington is a charming, picturesque community in the heart of Lyon County.

It's roots are in agriculture and mining, but it's really kept that small town feel.

And it acts as a great place for a base camp for adventure and exploration.

It's also a really good place to learn more about the history of Lyon County, and I'm doing that here at the Lyon County Museum.

To start my visit, I meet Jeff Page, a longtime Yerington resident and member of the museum board.

Thanks, Jeff, for meeting me out here.

- Your welcome.

Welcome to Lyon County Museum.

- This is a really pretty building.

- It is.

This building in itself is 130 years old.

Came from Mason from the Bluestone Mine era.

And when we moved here in the 50s and 60s, was a Baptist church, a seventh Day Adventist church, and a Lutheran Church.

The Museum Society took it in the 1970s.

- [Chris] So it has been a running museum for more than 50 years at this point.

- [Jeff] Since the 70s, yes.

- [Chris] This is a great museum.

There's so much in here.

- This building particularly was the first portion of the museum back in the 1970s.

A number of exhibits in here, some old clothing, the military on the top shelves, that goes from World War I all the way through to the most recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The flags are representative of folks who had served in the military.

Some of those are men who had been killed in action during some conflict.

There's a room off to the side that is representative of what the courthouse used to be like in the day.

The next one over is an old barbershop, which was on the south end of town.

When I was a kid, I went in to get my haircut.

And you always wanted to make sure you got your haircut before noon, because afternoon Mac was a little tired and you may not always get a straight haircut.

On this side of the museum is the history of Anaconda coming to Yerington Mason Valley in the 1950s.

And I think it's very important for the community to understand what the history of mining was like then compared to what it is like now, right?

And when they came in 1952, things like the EPA, mining standards, didn't exist.

Today, all that exists.

And so it's kind of interesting to see what mining used to be like to where we are today.

It's just a phenomenal place.

Every time I come in here, I've been doing this now for 10, 11 years, I always find something new.

- [Chris] There is much to see inside the museum, but there is also a variety of exhibits and additional structures to visit outside.

Touring the grounds with Jeff, I get an even greater appreciation for the role the community has played in preserving so much local history.

- And the beauty about this museum is actually 100% of this stuff is either donated to the museum where it's on loan, some of it permanent loan.

When they first started, they had hardly anything.

And within 20 years, they added on the to the 16 buildings.

We started bringing buildings in throughout the valley in here and expanded the museum to what it is today.

So the gas station was run by the Hillygus family, Lowell and Clara Hillygus.

It was on the corner of Main and Bridge for decades.

Like every gas station in Yerington at the time, it was a full service gas station.

So you drove up, they asked you what you wanted, you could get leaded or unleaded back in the day.

- [Chris] Two choices.

- You had two choices.

And Clara would get up on a two-step ladder with a sponge and clean your windshield.

She never used a squeegee and it was full service.

Off to the side of it, was a little lean-to where he took care of tires and did any mechanical work he needed to do.

And the cool thing when I was a kid was I lived just around the corner from where the service station was.

On Saturday, we'd sneak over with our quarters that we stole out of our mom's purse to buy a Coke out of the Coke machine.

But it was part of this community for decades.

If anybody that had lived in for any length of time, they remember Lowell and Clara, right?

- [Chris] You know, it's a great way of not only capturing a time period, but really capturing a family that was a big part of the community.

- So we get up to the Thompson building.

A number of displays in there.

Dr.

Mary Fulstone, one of the first female doctors in the state of Nevada.

She practiced until she was 80-something.

She had an office in Smith Valley and an office in Yerington.

My dad was born in her hospital.

And then at night when she left the hospital, she would tell my grandmother, "You got the phone there.

If you need anything, call me, right?"

She stayed in the hospital, but there was nobody there to take care of her.

- So as someone who was born and raised in the Yerington area, how important is it to be able to preserve this much history and be able to really tell the story?

- [Jeff] I think it's very important so people have an idea of where we came from, what it was like, to where we are today.

So I think preserving the history of the valley is very important so people have an idea of what it was like and what's changed.

- What do you wish people knew about this area?

- Especially for the people that have moved in here in the last 10, 15 years is what a community Yerington has been and can still be.

Neighbor helping neighbor, neighbors being involved in everything in the community.

The museum is a perfect example.

We get on an average weekend six to eight people on a Friday, maybe another six to eight on a Saturday, right?

Come down and see what it's about.

People are so used to going to Reno, or Tahoe, or Vegas for entertainment.

There's a lot to do in this community if you just pay attention and see what's going on.

- [Chris] Especially a museum that has this much of the community invested in it.

So many personal items and so many family items.

You really feel a sense of both, not just the history, but the area in just looking at the artifacts.

- [Jeff] I look at some of the things that are from my own family that are here that have sentimental attachment.

I mean, it may not be worth a lot money wise, but the sentimental that goes along with it, as well as just the fact that somebody cared for some of this stuff for so long before we got it.

So it just a testament to the people who donate to the museum, their value on the history of their family, their value on the history of the valley and the city.

- Well, thank you for showing it to me.

- Thank you.

- It's quite a treasure.

Quite a treasure for the community and for the whole region.

(gentle music) Only half a mile away is a piece of living history.

At the Jeanne Dini Cultural Center, which is the home of the Yerington Theater for the Arts, I meet Nick Beaton.

Hey, Nick, thanks for meeting out here.

- Of course.

- Of this amazing building.

- It is my favorite spot in the entire town.

There is no better backdrop for an event.

There is no better place to hang out.

I love it here.

- [Chris] What was this building?

- So this is the original grammar school number nine.

It started serving kids here in Yerington back in 1906.

And right at the turn of the century, you know, they were constructing and getting it going.

More than six classrooms in this facility.

They continued to expand it through the 40s and 50s.

In 1978, the building stopped being a schoolhouse as the other schools around us began to open up.

It stayed dormant as storage for about a decade before a gal by the name of Jeanne Dini, wife of Joe Dini, the longtime Nevada assemblyman, decided she wanted to turn this into a cultural center.

It became a passion project of hers.

Multiple individuals from around the area rallied behind it.

Multiple groups brought in funding.

And the efforts took nearly a decade, but in the late 90s, this opened up as the Jeanne Dini Cultural Center.

- You wanna show me a little more inside?

- Absolutely.

Let's head in.

(upbeat music) - [Chris] This is a great space.

This is a lot of fun down here.

- Yeah, this is the 6D Speakeasy.

It's our main gathering spot for events.

It's a bar that we have open every single Friday.

A building this old is hard to pay the bills on sometimes, and so I always tell people that the speakeasy is what pays the bills.

So when we have a cold January and our heating bill's 1800 bucks and we can do that, all the events and the money that we were able to raise from those are what goes towards making the building a better place.

- This space has probably seen some really fun stories.

- Absolutely.

And the bar itself is not terribly old.

It's only about six or seven years old.

There was one of our original board members, Rod McMullen, and when I say original, he was on the board before Yerington Theater of the Arts was the board.

Him, his friends, Ralph Gates and a couple of others, kind of came up with this idea.

And Rod thought this would be cool.

And Ralph kind of came in and helped to fund it, and the 6D Speakeasy was born.

And it's called the 6D Speakeasy because that's the number of the apartment that they were in their freshman year when they started attending Fort Hayes State over in Kansas.

It's a neat origin story.

The whole theme of the bar is comradery.

When you come here, you're surrounded by friends, even if you haven't met them yet.

And it's just a very fun, casual place to hang out.

We have zero paid staff.

Every single ounce of hour of work that goes into this place is a volunteer hour, whether that's by our own board of directors.

We partner a lot with the Keystone Club at Boys and Girls Clubs in Mason Valley.

They're a teen-based community service group.

So they'll come down and do a whole day of deep cleaning.

National Honor Society kids from the local high school.

The Yerington Main Street Committee.

The local Rotary Club.

It's definitely a focal point where people know that they got to chip in to keep it going.

- Well that's beautiful.

I'm excited to see what the theater looks like.

- Do you wanna head in?

- Yeah.

- All right.

(gentle music) This room is the whole point of the building, right?

This is where the culture happens.

- So how many seats do you have in the theater?

- It's 138 seat theater, depending on how many seats we're able to add or pull in on any given show.

- Well, and when you have a theater that has really this small a space, it's an intimate performance even if it's sold out.

- It's an incredible place to come see a show.

There's not a bad seat in the house.

The sound's fantastic.

You're up close and personal.

It's really hard to beat.

- Well, there is definitely something about being on stage under the stage lights.

- Absolutely.

- And this feels really special.

- I performed on this stage multiple times as a child, yeah.

(laughs) - It's got to feel really special keeping it alive for the next generation and the generation after that.

- This is a very unique thing for a small town in rural Nevada.

You do not see this almost anywhere else.

So the fact that our high school band can come and perform here, our high school choir, the local drama clubs, right, touring theater groups all given the chance.

The Through a Child's Eyes Foundation are doing the Nutcracker right here.

Getting the chance to feature our community and our local talents right here on this stage is something that should never, ever go away.

- Well, thank you for sharing it with me.

- Of course.

Thank you guys for coming.

- I'm gonna get my tickets for one of the performances.

I'll be back.

It's so good.

- Yeah.

Thank you for being here.

- The next day, I'm out at Walker Lake to meet Peter Stanton of the Walker Basin Conservancy.

- Peter, thanks for meeting me out here.

- Absolutely.

Thanks for making the trip, Chris.

Welcome to Walker Lake.

- It's great to be back here.

It's been a lot of years since I visited.

- It's nice to stop, kind of take a little bit of a walk down to the lake, get a sense for the place today.

So I'm thinking we'll kind of orient ourselves here at Walker Lake, get a sense of kind of how water has shaped this landscape, and then we'll follow the river up towards Schurz past Weber Reservoir, and then ultimately into Mason Valley and Yerington.

- Okay.

Well, should we head down?

- Yeah, let's start walking.

- [Chris] For almost a century, diversions from the Walker River have sustained a strong agricultural economy in the area, but they've also produced an unintended consequence, the dramatically reduced fresh water inflow to Walker Lake and the lower part of the river.

The mission of the Walker Basin Conservancy is to restore and maintain the lake while protecting agricultural, environmental, and recreational interests throughout the basin.

To do so, the conservancy acquires water rights from willing sellers and protects this water in stream for the benefit of Walker Lake.

- Well, let's take a quick pause here, Chris, 'cause these signs as we make our way down to the beach tell a pretty important story, right?

So we are standing right now where Walker Lake was in 1908, right?

So this sign shows the lake level in 1908.

- Which is amazing to think because we've got, what is it, maybe half a mile?

- Yep.

We've got a ways to go.

About a hundred vertical feet to go.

The lake has gone down considerably.

And so over the last roughly 100, 150 years, Walker Lake has lost 90% of its volume and more than half of its surface area.

So it used to be twice as large.

And upstream diversion of the Walker River has meant that less water has reached the lake, evaporation keeps happening, and those low water levels have led to the ecological collapse of Walker Lake.

The last trout was caught in Walker Lake in 2009.

The last fish of any kind that had been living in the lake, 2015.

And that's because not enough water is flowing through the Walker River and reaching Walker Lake.

It's being diverted.

- And if you think that that's really what, 120, 110 years ago, that's massive amount of change in not a lot of geological time.

- That's right.

That's right.

And you can see it almost on a geological scale out here, right?

You can see where the water used to be as you look around Walker Lake, right?

And the lake has been a huge part of human communities out here for a long time.

At the conservancy, we work with farmers and ranchers to increase the flows of the Walker River, bring Walker Lake back up, and ultimately restore a fishery at Walker Lake.

- [Chris] So even though the Walker Lake has been in decline, you guys are working to really bring it back.

- Absolutely.

- And reverse that.

- [Peter] Absolutely.

The trajectory of Walker Lake, whether the lake's going up or whether it's going down today, is the consequence of our choices as a society.

At the Conservancy, we work to bring balance to this and ensure that water rights reflect the need for water in Walker Lake.

(gentle guitar music) - So we made it down to the lake level.

- Made it down to the lake, kind of get the chance to get a feel for, you know, what Walker Lake is like these days.

A little bit of the history.

And as we come down here, you know, Walker Lake's about 16 feet higher than it was just a few years ago.

- It's great to know that there's people advocating for it and working to really restore and keep it healthy.

- You know, I'm really excited to share that over the last few years there's been a lot of good news and a lot of reasons for hope, right?

You know, we work with farmers and ranchers to increase the volume of water reaching Walker Lake.

And over the last decade, we've worked with 157 farmers and ranchers in the Walker River, right?

Like the adoption of this lake and taking proactive steps to save it has really been spreading quite a bit.

- From Walker Lake, we travel north on US 95, taking a left turn onto Weber Reservoir Road.

Along the way, we meet Marlene Begay of the Walker River Paiute Tribe.

Thank you for meeting us out here today.

This is such a beautiful part of the river.

- This is a great fishing place.

Recreational.

We allow camping.

It's really a cool area.

Weber Dam is holding up the Walker River and we use that for irrigation.

But Weber Dam also is the place where the water comes out of the river for the river down.

And it goes down to Walker Lake, which is about 20-some miles from here.

So it has a long journey, the water.

I'm an elder.

The way we grew up was swimming in irrigation ditches, swimming in Weber Dam.

I think everything's trying to adapt.

I mean, one thing we did a long time ago just to protect our children was we built a swimming pool in Schurz because they didn't have a place to swim.

I think one thing I can remember is when I was young going to Walker Lake and going fishing with my dad.

We would actually park right along the highway and walk down.

Now it's a really long hike, but we'd go there and spend the whole day fishing.

And we'd catch a lot of trout, and we'd bring them home, and cook them up, and eat them, and give some away.

And it's kind of like just bringing people together, which we can't do anymore.

I can't remember the last time I had a trout.

Walker Lake is very important to the tribe because for us it's called Agai Pa, which means Trout Lake.

Our tribe is actually called Agai-Dicutta, which means Trout Eaters.

And we were dependent on the trout for a lot of years until probably about 20 years ago when the lake could not sustain any fish anymore.

So all the trout and all the fish died, which really affected our culture because that's who we are.

And now there's no more trout.

Our tribe is working on getting trout back and by having the conservancy put more water into the river and get that to the lake, we really appreciate that.

- What do you wish people knew that maybe they don't see now when they visit the lake or when they visit the river?

- I wish they could envision it how I remember it.

We just really need to take care of what we have right now.

It starts with the mountains where the snowpack's coming from.

And about five or six years ago, we all, the elders and some young people, were up in the mountains near Sweetwater and we prayed for water for snow that year.

We prayed for 50 feet of snow and we got it.

And that was one of the years where we really had good water for the lake that came in and it looked really fresh and good.

We've always fought for the water.

And we need clean water.

We need clean air and clean water.

Today you see a lot of cotton balls flying around, so the river system is good.

We just have to take care of it and continue to take care of it.

We have to adapt.

We have to keep going no matter what.

- [Chris] It's especially meaningful to hear Marlene's perspective, and we carry her words with us as we head back toward Yerington.

From the reservoir, we return to pavement by turning onto Alternate US 95.

Heading back toward the community of Yerington, we turn onto Pete Hendricks Road before heading north onto Aiazzi Lane and then Lux Lane to access the Mason Valley Wildlife Management Area.

The Mason Valley Wildlife Management Area is located about 11 miles northeast of Yerington and incorporates a large wetlands area surrounded by agriculture.

So the landscape over the day has definitely changed.

This feels like a very different place than when we started.

- Definitely.

Gets a little greener as you move up river, right?

- Yeah, what a difference a little more water makes, right?

- Exactly.

You know, here in Nevada, like water is life and you can definitely see that here.

So we're out here at the Mason Valley Wildlife Management Area now.

So we've come about another 20,30 river miles up river.

I think the drive was about 30 minutes, something like that, from Weber Reservoir out here to Mason Valley.

- You know, and every step of it has been really pretty, but you really do see the change in landscape when you get a little more water on the landscape.

- Big time.

So, you know, on our drive here, we were driving through onion fields, through row crops, through alfalfa and hay fields.

And where we are right now is a former ranch.

So this is the historic Miller and Lux Ranch up at the north end of Mason Valley.

And today it is one of the best waterfowl hunting areas, great fishing area.

And the Department of Wildlife actually has a fish hatchery out here now as well.

Here in Mason Valley, folks estimate that about 90% of the wetland habitat has disappeared since European arrival, since about the 1850s, right?

And so to be out here, to be on the river in an oasis like this with mature trees all around, a ton of native plants here, and you can hear the birds right now chirping in the background, you know, fish in the river, fish coming from the hatchery.

It's pretty cool out here.

(bright guitar music) - You know, when you come out to a location like this and you think about just the entities that are involved to preserve this and to allow people to enjoy it, it's one thing.

But when you experience it, and you hear the birds, and you hear the wind in the trees, you understand how important it is to provide it because it really is a beautiful example of what our landscape can be.

- [Peter] Absolutely, and like so much of Nevada, you know, if you're just driving through and you don't stop to take the time, you don't wonder, "Hmm, I wonder why there's trees out there on the horizon," that sort of thing, you miss beautiful experiences like we're having here today.

- Peter, thank you for sharing the day with me and bringing me to these beautiful locations.

- Absolutely.

It's an area that's near and dear to my heart.

And I mean, we got to experience from Walker Lake to Schurz and Weber Reservoir all the way up here to Mason Valley.

It's different everywhere you go in the Walker, but it's wild no matter where you are.

- One of the best ways to help advocate for the Walker Lake and the river is to be able to show it.

And the Walker Basin Conservancy's land and water rights management projects need strong visuals to support their work.

During my visit, I got to join them on a video safari with the nonprofit EcoFlight to capture some stunning images of the Walker Lake and river basin from above.

We took off from an airport that I've driven by probably 100 times without noticing.

And this plane is much smaller than I'm used to.

But once we're off the ground, the flight opens up a whole new perspective of the area for me.

(gentle music) EcoFlight is a nonprofit that provides flights for stakeholders over critical environmental areas to help educate and advocate for their protection.

What a privilege to see Walker River Basin in the company of the people who are so dedicated to restoring it.

That's all I've got time for in this episode, but it's been fascinating following the Walker River through the communities, and the history, and the landscapes that it has shaped.

If you wanna learn more about this "Wild Nevada" or any in the series, visit our website at pbsreno.org, and stream us with the PBS app.

And until my next "Wild Nevada" adventure, I hope you get to have some Nevada adventures of your own.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Support for PBS Reno and "Wild Nevada" comes in part from the William N. Pennington Foundation.

Bill Pennington was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and gaming pioneer who built a legacy of community service in Nevada.

- [Narrator] And by Thelma B. and Thomas P. Foundation, Kristine Perry, Margaret Burback, Mark and Susan Herron, in memory of Sue McDowell, Lloyd Rogers and Gaia Brown, Stanley and Neila Schumaker, and by individual members.

(gentle upbeat music)