PYRAMID LAKE

Sand-colored tufa spires ring Lahontan’s deepest remnant, Pyramid Lake, lending it a sense of alien antiquity. Surrounded by barren desert roughly 30 miles northeast of Reno, the lake is named for the massive tufa formation in its center. The Northern Paiutes (within whose reservation the lake lies) have passed down stories of a serpent for hundreds of years. According to legend, a native girl who violated the tribe’s moral code was banished to the lake’s island. Her death was attributed to the monster. (The island was named Anaho in her post-mortem honor.)

Packed with cutthroat trout and the bony cui-ui, the natives fished Pyramid abundantly, but avoided the lake itself, holding its island in “superstitious dread.” Recommending the island not be used for commercial ventures, a local Indian agent by the name of Le Bass explained his assessment of 1870. The Paiutes “told of their ancestors seeing a large snake or serpent in the lake some two or three hundred feet long.”

The first published sightings by white men occurred in 1869. According to the Elko Independent, Indians pleaded with a man named Spence, there to assess the lake for borax, to forgo his mission. They claimed the monster “had the power to draw everything within a mile of its head into its mouth.” The no-nonsense captain urged his crew into the middle of the lake when their boat nearly capsized thanks to something huge dozing on the lake’s surface.

“Stopping within a hundred yards of the monster… it was about 300 feet long… its scales appeared to be black and white, with a tendency to copper color.” On closer examination, Spence claimed the thing to be “an agglomeration of millions of worms of a species never before seen by him.” Evidently the worms were clever enough to fashion a head for their collective “monster,” and Spence soon left the area.

In 1883, the Reno Evening Gazette reported that a party of ladies had had a run in with the beast. “They saw the fearful creature that has frightened the Indians for so many years, describing it as being as big as a balloon, with a mouth on it like the forks of a road.”<>Commercial fisheries harvested 100 tons of trout at Pyramid between the winters of 1888 and ’89, and along with fishermen came fish tales. The creature was blamed for blockading fish at the mouth of the Truckee River which feeds into Pyramid, and was described in the Reno Evening Gazette as “having the body and tail of an alligator, with the flippers of a seal…[and] the mouth of a frog, which enables the animal to scoop in a wide streak of fish when he strikes a school.” A well-known fisherman went on to claim the monster would often sun itself along the island’s shore after gorging on trout.

“White hunters and trappers claimed to have seen something in the lake that closely resembles the serpent,” asserts a 1925 L. A. Times article, as the monster was blamed for depleting the lake of fish as well as visitors. The same article goes on to mention “stories of lonely fishermen surprised and dragged down by the horror… described as of greenish color, hundreds of feet in length, with a hideous horned head and cavernous mouth…[its] said to enter the lake through a vast underground passage extending from the Pacific Ocean and is said to have existed since prehistoric times.”

Worms? An optical illusion created by the heady landscape and rippling whirlwinds? Though reports of its visage are inconsistent and various theories have tried to explain it away, the Pyramid Lake monster was officially recognized by the Nevada State Assembly in 1959. The bill, introduced by Democratic Assemblyman Don Crawford, was passed by overwhelming majority and prohibits “hunting, molesting or capturing” the beast, its nest, eggs or young.