The Sink

The Humboldt River did not provide the Walker Expedition with great trapping.  Nor did its banks provide much game.  So although the expedition members weren’t making money as they traveled along the Humboldt, and although they were eating into the meat supplies they’d prepared hundreds of miles back along the Bear River, the Humboldt at least provided a dependable water source to get through arid country.  The repetition with which subsequent travelers would follow the Humboldt – the California wagon trail, the transcontinental railroad, Interstate 80 – testifies to the importance of its waters.  Riding at the heads of their packstrings, alternately crashing through willows and inhaling the alkali dust raised by their companions, the men of the Walker Expedition may have remembered the forested slopes of the Rocky Mountains fondly.  But as they looked away from the Humboldt and gazed across the desiccated expanses of salt, dust, and sage on either side, they were doubtless thankful to have a river to follow.

Until it sank into the sand.

The Humboldt River never runs into another river and never runs to the ocean.  It just runs out of water.  It stops at the Humboldt Sink, just southwest of present-day Lovelock, Nevada.  In 1833, the river slowed as it neared its terminus, pooling into a series of small lakes before culminating in one large lake with no outlet.  There, in Leonard’s words, the water “becomes stagnant and very disagreeable.”  Much like the Great Salt Lake.  Since 1833, however, humans have rescripted the end of the Humboldt.  Today it is dammed into the Rye Patch Reservoir about 35 miles north of the historic sink, then flows through farming country where agriculturalists siphon from its waters.  It forms no more lakes.  Modern canals carry water in various directions, but the river’s natural course runs south from the reservoir past Lovelock, then turns west toward the historic sink.  The sink is where the large lake of “stagnant and very disagreeable water” once stood, but today the sink stays dry most of the time.  As of my visit, the historic sink was a dry, glinting expanse of sand and salt deposits.  The Humboldt dries up somewhere between Lovelock and the sink.  Along that stretch, its course is marked by broad, thick stands of tamarisk, a tough, woody plant that grows taller than me.  Tamarisks are an invasive species, however, so in Walker’s day, willows probably would have marked the river’s course.

The historic sink.

That was a good thing for Walker, because tamarisks are tough to move through.  Tougher than willows.  “They’ll poke through a six-ply tire,” said the pickup-driving local who stopped beside me on a dirt road southwest of Lovelock.  He also told me about pucker brush – “it’s got thorns in it, so when you fall in, your asshole puckers” – and sinkholes where subsurface water softens playa sediment, making the surface unpredictably soft.  “Your truck will sink in to the mirrors,” he warned.

He’d been driving the other way on the narrow dirt road, but as I slowed and pulled to the edge of the road to let him pass, he slowed to a stop.  I knew this to be the national rural symbol for “let’s palaver,” so I stopped too.  I told him I was following the Humboldt’s course and wanted to find the point between Lovelock and the historic sink where the water stopped.

“Well I’ve got some duck blinds back in there, but I ain’t going to tell you where they are.”

Out west, this isn’t rude behavior.  Hunters don’t want to give away their secret places.  Since I have a dirty pickup truck, a camper, and a Labrador retriever, and maybe because of the way I talk, people often take me for a hunter.  Which I take as a compliment – it beats being taken for a Californian, yankee, or sissy.  I appreciated this guy’s forthrightness.  Others might have given vague directions, or intentionally incorrect directions.

“No, I’m not hunting.  I don’t even have my shotgun.  I’m working on a history project,” I told him.

His eyes told me he wasn’t convinced, so I told him a little more about my book.  I asked him a few more questions about local plants and springs to give him a chance to feel me out, and he told me about the country.

“So I guess I’ll just get down in that riverbottom and hike ‘till I find where the water stops,” I said eventually.

“Well, I know there’s water as far as my duck blinds.  It’s just a trickle, but the beavers have got some water dammed up.  If you drive down this road . . .”  He gave me directions to his duck blinds, but I am bound by the Code of the Country Palaver not to repeat them here.

I drove to the man’s duck blinds, then a little further downstream.  Having used my spare tire when I changed a flat earlier in the day, and having experienced wet playa dirt at Stinking Pants Spring, I stopped well short of the watercourse.  A second blown tire or a sunk truck would seriously derail my trip.  Duke and I got out and walked into the tamarisk thicket.

A scene I didn't want to repeat.

The riverbottom was several hundred yards wide.  It offered good grass between the thickets, a detail that Leonard noted in 1833.  The grass was yellowish-brown like store-bought hay, and the tamarisk thickets consisted of dark brown trunks with reddish-brown branches.  Low grayish-brown mountain ranges stood at the horizon.  A pretty scene, if you like brown.  Trails crisscrossed through the riverbottom, so Duke and I moved easily toward the far side.  We hiked over several dry gulches running along the river’s course, and were almost to the other side of the bottom when we hit a deep gulch that held water.  Not much water – just a foot-wide rivulet scarcely visible through the grass and weeds – but enough to let us know that the Humboldt still lived.  We followed it downstream.

The tamarisk-filled riverbottom.

Within a few hundred yards, we found the end.  I had envisioned the Humboldt stretching across sand, bravely giving its last full measure to reach the Pacific, reaching its end in self-sacrificial valor.  Or dipping under a rock from which it did not emerge, mysteriously vanishing into the earth where all springs began, ending its above-ground tenure by returning to the subterranean hydrologic cycle from which it sprang.  But it did neither of those.  It ended at a cow patty.  As of 4:30 on this late October day, the Humboldt slowed to a trickle, pushed past a few more reeds, then met a giant pile of cow shit that it could not pass.  Ignominious.  I sighed.  At least, as cow patties go, this was a large one.

I went back to the truck.

The end of the valiant Humboldt River.

Sunset over the Humboldt Sink.