Lahontan Reservoir
— a long blue line laid across the sage.
Not only on a wall.
Lahontan Reservoir, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“One of the first reservoirs the Bureau of Reclamation ever built. Lahontan Dam closed across the Carson River in 1915, part of the Newlands Project that brought irrigation water to the Lahontan Valley below. The reservoir runs about seventeen miles when full, a long ribbon of cold water across high desert country. Cottonwoods line the inlet at Churchill Beach. Wipers and walleye work the lower basin, and the state park keeps a chain of small camps along the shore. The water level rises and falls hard with the snowpack on the eastern Sierra. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Lahontan Reservoir lies along the Carson River in west-central Nevada, straddling Churchill and Lyon counties between Fallon and Silver Springs. It was formed by Lahontan Dam, completed in 1915 as part of the Newlands Project, one of the first irrigation works authorised under the 1902 Reclamation Act. At full pool the reservoir runs about seventeen miles and stores roughly 295,000 acre-feet of water. The Nevada Division of State Parks manages the shoreline as Lahontan State Recreation Area, with camping and launch facilities at Beach 7, Churchill Beach, and Silver Springs Beach.
The reservoir is a working reservoir. Stored water from the Truckee Canal and the Carson River is released downstream to irrigate roughly 73,000 acres of the Lahontan Valley around Fallon, and what remains supports the wetlands at Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge. The fishery is mixed warmwater: walleye, wipers, white bass, catfish, and a remnant native cui-ui run in the connected drainage. Surface levels swing widely with the eastern Sierra snowpack, dropping in late summer and refilling on the spring runoff out of the Carson Range.
U.S. Route 50, the Loneliest Road in America, runs along the south side of the reservoir between Carson City and Fallon, and most travellers see the water first from that highway. Lahontan State Recreation Area charges a day-use fee at the gate and a separate camping fee at the developed beaches. Boats launch year-round when ice and water levels allow. Summer brings the heaviest use, drawn from Reno and the Carson Valley; spring and autumn are the quieter weeks, when wind off the desert keeps most of the water to itself.
