The Truckee River flows out of Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada of California, and ends at Pyramid Lake in Nevada. For much of its length, it is paralleled by Interstate 80 with Reno, Nevada at about the halfway point. Before Euro-American settlers arrived in the mid-19th century, an overflow channel split off the Truckee before Pyramid Lake to fill a shallow lake, Winnemucca Lake, in the next valley to the east. It apparently supported a thriving waterfowl population. The water in the Truckee, however, was soon diverted for other…
