Tag: fallon

We're deep in the doldrums of summer now, as evidenced by the above picture. The snow has disappeared from even the darkest crevasses of Job's Peak, meaning that our snowpack is all but gone. This leads to the rivers drying up to little more than a trickle, and the water situation becoming more dire. Already this is causing problems to the east, with Lake Lahontan drying up to the point where it's no longer safe for boaters, and only supplying Fallon farmers with a fraction of what they usually get. Adding to the problem is the levee break that occurred in Fernley last January. The levee broke along the Truckee-Carson canal, which was built to take water from the Truckee River and send it to the Carson River and Fallon. The levee has been mostly fixed, but water flows are still restricted and will be for the foreseeable future. So the Carson River is extra low this year, the canal is running at a trickle, the lake is really low, and the farmers are looking at a short season because the water just isn't there. I'd say we could use some rain right about now. At least the fire in Yosemite is under control now, so the smoke is gone. One small consolation.

Gardnerville

I have to give a big public shoutout and thanks to Mark Englebretson. Mark is a postcard and casino memorabilia collector who lives in Wyoming. But he's fascinated with the history of Nevada casinos, and he runs the site nevadacasinoashtrays.org. There he displays his large collection of, yes, casino ashtrays, but also reveals photos and history tidbits for the casinos the ashtrays came from.

Fallon

Some time ago I noticed that there were a lot of good postcard photos of Carson City floating around, and I was seeing Mark's name next to them. So I got it in my head to contact Mark, see if he'd be willing to contribute a few of his postcards to the WNHPC and help build the collection.

Eureka

Mark's response was pretty enthusiastic, and in fact instead of singling out his Carson City photos he said that he would just send his whole "Nevada file," just to make things easier for him. I thought that sounded like a good idea. Because I'd get a whole lot of Vegas postcards that I could never use in the WNHPC, but they'd be fun to look at anyway.

Ely

So anyway his disc arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I popped it in the computer to look at the pictures. It turned out that there were over 1,500 postcards on this disc, an absolute treasure trove of historic photos of Nevada casinos, bars, and downtowns. Yes there are a lot of photos of Vegas (around 500), but there are also entries for just about every little town in the state, great stuff that I've never seen before. All of the photos accompanying this post are part of what he gave me.

Battle Mountain

So now I have all these pictures, and it's kind of a daunting task to organize them and add them to the WNHPC. But they'll all get there eventually. This stuff is too good to keep secret. And the rest might end up on Flickr or somewhere.

And above all, a big thanks to Mark for sharing in the first place!