Ancient sites, modern adventure
On Supreme Court justices, men too drunk to fish and the power of remembering in Nevada
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This is my latest story. It appears here.
My sense of time and history rose and fell as I stood with Donna Cossette deep in the desert outside Fallon, Nevada. The flat, hard-packed landscape spread out before us, just as barren as it was 3,500 years ago. In the distance, mountains stood like sentries, keeping watch, as they have for centuries over this sacred basin between the Rockies to the east and the Sierra Nevadas to the west.
Only the wind and our own voices broke the silence. “Out here, I hear stories, I hear the songs, I hear the families,” said Cossette, a member and former chairwoman of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone tribe and registrar of Fallon’s Churchill County Museum. As we looked out on the expanse of rocky brown terrain, she told me some of those stories, which transported me back thousands of years.
Cossette choked back tears as she talked about all that has happened since then, how traditional ways of life have been discarded, people have been displaced, ancient spiritual sites have been destroyed. It was a somber, heartfelt, powerful moment. ...
... Then fighter jets, practicing maneuvers from nearby Naval Air Station Fallon (home of the real Top Gun) roared overhead and yanked us right back to the present.
The moment lost, we walked up a trail on our way to Hidden Cave, an archaeological site rich with history of Cossette’s ancestors. She brought an umbrella even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. She opened it and angled it just so, casting a shadow onto rock, which revealed ancient designs that would otherwise have been invisible. These ancient works of art tell spiritual stories. “When you walk up to one, you might be walking up to one of the oldest churches in North America,” Cossette said. “We don’t call them rock art or petroglyphs. We call them ‘our father’s writing.’”
I looked around, trying to imagine arriving here for church. Where I was standing, 12,000 years ago I would have been under water. Back then, Lake Lahontan was one of the largest lakes in North America. It covered 8,500 square miles (bigger than modern-day Lake Ontario and nearly as big as Lake Erie) and reached depths of 900 feet. Because of changes in the climate, it receded.
Lake Lahontan is gone, but in some ways it still shapes the region it once dominated. It left behind fascinating stories of ancient history, stories about survival, stories as exciting as your next great adventure vacation and as mysterious as Hidden Cave, even stories that are still being lived out.
Lake Lahontan left behind Pyramid Lake. It is 15 miles long, 11 miles wide, and sits entirely within the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Reservation.
I arrived on its banks late on a Sunday night. The sky was so black I didn’t realize the trailer I slept in at Pyramid Lake Lodge sat only a short distance from the water. I woke up at dawn stunned to see the water scorched with pink, purple, and blue as the sun slowly rose.
I scanned the shore, both my side and the other. I saw no houses, no boats — nothing but the lake and the desert around it as a blank canvas for the sun to paint, as it has since Lahontan receded thousands of years ago. In a modern travel age of overtourism, where every square inch has to have either a condo or serve as an Instagram backdrop (or both), it was refreshing to visit a place whose natural beauty hasn’t been scarred by development.
Two hours later, the fishing pole at the back of George Molino’s charter boat quivered, the telltale sign there was a fish snooping around the lure that was trolling the bottom of Pyramid Lake.
I jumped out of my seat and ran to the back of the boat. But something wasn’t exactly right. The fish had apparently nibbled at the lure rather than bitten it. If I grabbed the pole now and started reeling, I would lose it. I stood in front of the pole, my hands cupped around it but not touching it, like a child trying to catch a firefly.
“Wait,” said Molino, who as owner of Cutthroat Charter has been fishing here for 30 years. “Wait ...”
PING!
“NOW!”
I started reeling — “fish on!” Molino called out, nearly as delighted as I was. A minute later, I grinned broadly as I posed with one of a half-dozen trout I caught that were so big I don’t have to lie about them.
A few minutes later, it started again. As I cranked on the reel again, Molino said from behind me, “little bit bigger;” it was half-question, half statement. He saw from the bend in the pole what the burning in my shoulders told me: This fish was a monster — 28.5 inches of shimmering silver-and-pink glory, with a back-from-the-dead backstory as outsized as its 12-pound girth.
It’s called a Lahontan cutthroat trout. It is Nevada’s state fish, culturally significant to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and for decades thought to be extinct.
The fish was an important food source for untold generations of Paiute. But settlers who arrived in the 1800s caught and ate them in such enormous quantities that they disappeared. By 1943, they were gone from Pyramid Lake and believed to be extinct.
In the 1970s, a fish that looked like a Lahontan cutthroat was found in a “dinky” stream (as one biologist described it) in Utah. But trout look alike; it’s hard to separate one from the other visually. Could there be a connection between this small fish living in a small creek and the Lahontan cutthroat trout that played a critical role in the region’s history?
By the 1990s, DNA testing confirmed the fish in that stream in Utah was the long-lost species, and in 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service partnered with the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe to restock the Lahontan cutthroat trout back into its home waters in Pyramid Lake.
And now I beamed into the camera holding an enormous one. If the story about how that fish got into Molino’s boat was good, the stories Molino tells about the humans in his boat were even better. “At this point in my career, what I like the best is I never know who I’m going to meet,” said Molino, who is Shoshone-Paiute. “All different kinds of backgrounds, money levels, everything. You get to hear different stories. I can tell you stories on stories, things you wouldn’t want to write about that I’ve seen.”
I think, but don’t say, Of course I want to write about the crazy things you’ve seen.
“I’ve seen damn near a little bit of everything on these boats.”
Some of it he’d rather forget, like the time a client was too drunk to fish. But there were many more stories he delighted in telling. There was one about the Secret Service guys drinking beer out of red plastic cups. They were on his boat; a cabinet-level secretary from Washington, D.C., was on another. A black helicopter flew over that day; that was probably not a coincidence.
There was another about Molino’s father-in-law taking John Denver fishing. Clark Gable pulled fish out of Pyramid Lake; he also filmed The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe in the area.
Molino’s best story, though, involves Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia, who died in 2016, is perhaps the most conservative Supreme Court justice in U.S. history, and Molino’s politics lean the other way. But right and left fade into irrelevance the second Molino shouts, “fish on!” “He was a good outdoorsman,” Molino says, and they hit it off on the four days they spent fishing on Pyramid Lake.
Scalia asked Molino to clean and freeze the fish, gave him his address, and asked him to ship them there. He told Molino if he was ever in Washington to stop by and see him, and he’d give him a tour of the Supreme Court.
A few years later, Molino planned a trip to D.C. He sent a note to Scalia hoping he’d make good on the promise. He included a picture of them together and asked if he remembered their time on his boat. “A week later his secretary called. ‘Yeah, he remembers who you are, and he can’t wait until you get here,’” Molino says.
Scalia posed for pictures in a courtyard and welcomed Molino and his family into his office, which was decorated with mounted elk and salmon. He told Molino the fish from Pyramid Lake were delicious, and he arranged for him and his family to have an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the Supreme Court. “I’m this little guy in Nevada,” Molino says, “and he remembered me.”
Remembered. That’s a critically important, and even loaded, word when talking about Native American culture in Nevada. So much has been forgotten, lost, destroyed, discarded, treated as insignificant. History is not fragile — it’s solid, unchangeable, permanent. But our grasp of it is quite fragile, as is our appreciation of it, our ability to learn from it and understand it.
And this breaks Cossette’s heart.
We talked “in front of” Hidden Cave, though the entrance is small and obscure enough to make you wonder if there is a bigger entrance somewhere else that hasn’t been found yet. Maybe what seems to be the front really isn’t.
As one archaeologist put it on a video about the cave that plays at the Churchill County Museum, the cave smells like science. By that he meant formaldehyde, and that’s the first thing I noticed after I stooped through the small door to get inside.
Evidence of human activity outside the cave dates to 10,000 years ago. Nearly 4,000 years ago, ancestors of the Toi-Ticutta (or Cattail-Eaters, from whom Cossette is descended) started to use the cave extensively. Massive droughts 2,000 years ago dried up the massive and strategic water source, spelling the end of the cave’s use — until boys on a treasure hunt “discovered” it in the 1920s.
Since then, there have been three major archaeological digs inside the cave. With wooden stairs, lights, and markers highlighting key discoveries — food caches, nets, baskets, arrows, beads that might have been money — it still looks like an active site.
Along the rock face where archaeologists dug is a horizontal white line, as if someone drew on it with chalk. But it’s not chalk; it’s ash from Mount Mazama, a volcano in Oregon that erupted 6,900 to 7,700 years ago. The explosion was massive. It devastated the surrounding terrain and sent ash to what are now eight states and three Canadian provinces.
The ash that settled in Hidden Cave has proved invaluable in ascertaining dates. Anything found below it predates the explosion. Anything above it comes from after.
There’s a bit of mystery to the cave. What was it, exactly? It wasn’t a home. It wasn’t a burial site. In seeking a modern-day equivalent, archaeologists suggest it could have been something like a grandma’s attic (Native Americans left stuff there expecting it to be safe); a garage (it stored tools, baskets, fishing gear, etc.); and a food pantry.
Those are all good enough, and accurate enough. But they suggest frequent use, which is doubtful, and they presuppose a sense of ownership of the goods inside that was probably lacking. It was more like an emergency cache than a pantry.
The Native Americans who used the cave did so more because they had to, than because they wanted to. “These kinds of cache pits would have been used in extreme measures,” Cossette said. “If there’s a drought out there, or if fire incinerated an entire area, or something happened that was at a catastrophic level, you knew where to go get food.”
We ducked back through the opening and into the sunshine. Cossette told me more stories, including one about a mountain bluebird (the Nevada state bird), which sings beautifully. That musical sound comes with a warning, though: She doesn’t like to share. And if you try to sing her songs, she will get jealous and tell her big brother.
Her big brother is a rattlesnake.
And there were still more stories — about Cossette’s ancestors’ battles and basketmaking, heroes and villains, and long nighttime runs through the desert on medical emergencies. Cossette has to keep telling them for fear if she doesn’t, they’ll eventually be like Lake Lahontan, lost forever.