Some days the big rides were not on. Early spring, early summer, the high country still wet or still cold, Peavine not ready. On those days I went east instead.
East out of the house, or down Virginia Street and under the Arch first, because you may as well look at downtown on the way past. Then a left, and onto the Truckee River trail.
I had heard there were petroglyphs out that way. Somewhere east of Sparks, in a range with the very good name of Pah Pah — which is what I have always called it, and which turns out to be one of five names it goes by. I had a BLM map, or a sketch I had made off one at the library — I am honestly not sure which any more. But I had something. Enough to go on.
Curiosity is my map.
A whole ride by itself
The river trail runs the length of the Truckee Meadows, through Reno and Sparks, following the water the whole way. Paved. Parks strung along it. Trees.
It is a genuinely different environment from the desert and the mountains that start about ten minutes off either end of it — a green corridor cut through brown country, and a real treasure for that region. Plenty of people ride it and never go further, and that is a perfectly good day.
On this one I went all the way out to the end of it, which takes a while, and then kept going.
Why there is a green line through the desert
Everything alive in the Truckee Meadows is alive because of that river. It leaves Lake Tahoe, runs down through Reno and Sparks, and ends in Pyramid Lake with no outlet to the sea.
Cottonwood and willow follow the water and nothing else, so the green stops the instant the water does. You feel that transition on a bike more than in a car. One minute shade and the sound of water, the next minute neither.
What is that, and why
Out at the east end I crossed over I-80 and started working my way up into the hills.
And there was a quarry. A big one. What I understood at the time, and still understand, is that they were digging clay out of that ground to make cat litter.
Which allowed me to ask a number of profound questions while riding around it. What is this. Why is it here. Who decided. Is there someone whose whole job is knowing where the good cat litter clay is.
There is, as it turns out. And a few years after I rode past that hole in the ground, the same question got a great deal more serious.
In 1999 the Oil-Dri Corporation of Chicago — which bills itself as the world’s largest maker of kitty litter — proposed mining clay on BLM land in Hungry Valley, a few hundred feet from the homes of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony.
The BLM approved it, saying it had no authority to refuse a claim staked under the General Mining Act of 1872. Washoe County denied the permit, citing arsenic, lead and cadmium. Oil-Dri sued, backed by the federal government.
A lawyer for the Colony put it about as well as it can be put: We don’t think Congress in 1872 was thinking of clumping kitty litter.
The county won in 2004. The mine was never built. This was a different operation from the one I rode past, and it came later — but it is the same valley, the same clay, and the same 1872 law that let somebody stake a claim on Peavine a hundred and forty years ago.
Raw desert, quite suddenly
Past the quarry the pavement ended and I was on dirt road, which got rougher the further in it went. No trouble for the Paragon. This was what the bike was for.
And it went on for a while, and it was amazing, because not long before that I had been cruising downtown Reno looking at the casinos, and now I was out here.
The Pah Pah is a range in the way a lot of Nevada is a range — more hills than mountains, if you have just come from the Sierra. But the rock is completely different. Basalt and other volcanic material, dark and broken, nothing like granite. Geologically it is as complicated as anywhere else; it just does not announce itself the way the Sierra does.
The range with five names
I have called it the Pah Pah Range my whole life. The official USGS name is Pah Rah — but Pah Pah is a recorded variant in the federal names database, alongside Pah-Rah Mountains, Pyramid Range, Rah-rah Range, and, confusingly, Virginia Mountains.
Five names for one range, and the official one may be wrong. Pah Rah is Paiute, roughly “Lake Mountain,” for Pyramid Lake off its northeast end. Except that name fits the Virginia Mountains better, and the accepted explanation is that early surveyors got it crossed and it stuck.
The range runs about twenty miles north from Sparks to Pyramid Lake. Virginia Peak at the far end is 8,370 feet — the most topographically prominent summit in Washoe County. More prominent than anything on Peavine.
And the boundary between this range and the Virginia Range to the south is the Truckee River. The man-made version of that same line is Interstate 80.
Which means the overpass I rode across that morning was the actual edge of the thing. One side Virginia Range, the other side this. I had no idea. I was just getting over a freeway.
I rode until I got to what I am fairly sure was Griffith Canyon, though I could not swear to the name then and I am not certain of it now.
For real deal petroglyphs
I made it to the rocks and started seeing them, and they were the real thing.
People. Animals — some of them animals that have not been around the Truckee Meadows in a very long time. Squiggles. Symbols for who knows what. Just wild.
Some graffiti too, modern stuff scratched over the top, which was a disappointment. Burned-out campfires with tires in them. Beer cans. So not pristine, not by a long way.
But still: hundreds of carvings on those rocks, made by people who stood exactly where I was standing, and nobody out there but me.
What is actually carved there
Over 150 glyphs are recorded in that canyon, attributed to the Northern Paiute, on dark basalt panels — the weathered outer surface pecked away to expose lighter rock underneath. Concentric circles, ladders, bighorn sheep, human figures, geometric grids. And long chipped squiggles.
What none of it means is known. Hunting, fertility, territory, ceremony, something else entirely — the honest position, and the one every archaeologist writing about this site takes, is that nobody knows.
The panels sit on land that is not Forest Service and not BLM. No signage, no fencing, no protection of any kind. Which is why the graffiti is there, and why I am not putting directions in this piece.
I got off the bike, left it in the dirt, and started climbing up the rocks to find more. There were more. Curiosity is my map, so I kept going up.
Warm sunny morning. Spring, I am fairly confident. Alone out there, scrambling around on volcanic rock a long way from anybody, which was not new for me and which twenty-something Brooks did not think about at all.
I put my hand up on the rock
I reached up to pull myself higher, put my hand flat on the rock, and spooked a rattlesnake.
It went flying. Straight across the rock and down into a crack, making a tremendous amount of noise on the way, and it was scared and I was scared and then it was gone.
Fine. That happens. I had bunny-hopped enough of them on trails by then. But I was a fair way up by that point, so I thought: right, that is the signal, time to head back down.
And I turned around.
And that is when I found out there was not one rattlesnake.
Because the whole area I had just climbed through was now rattling.
Not one snake. That is not a sound one snake makes. So I took a careful look around, and there were rattlesnakes all through those rocks. Down in the cracks, under the ledges, all around the ground I had been putting my hands and feet on for the last however many minutes.
And that is when I got the message.
The squiggles. All those long chipped squiggly lines down on the panels below me. Those were snakes. I had been looking at pictures of rattlesnakes carved into the rock, and then I had climbed up above them onto a rattlesnake den.
Message received. Well played.
The rocks underneath me rattling
So I turned around and started down, and the rocks underneath me were rattling the whole way, and I got out of there pretty quick.
Back at the bottom where the bike was, with a serious amount of adrenaline going, thinking: what the actual hell just happened. Oh, nothing. Just a wall of ancient carvings, and a rattlesnake den, and the carvings turning out to be of the snakes. A prehistoric message delivered straight through to the present, to me, personally, that morning.
Great Basin rattlesnakes hibernate communally in what biologists call ancestral dens, and they are strongly philopatric — they go back to the same den, year after year, generation after generation. Groups run from about ten to fifty animals, most of them related. Newborns are thought to find their way there by following their mother’s scent.
A park biologist who has studied them for seventeen years put it plainly: if you find a good place to spend the winter in the Great Basin, you stick with it.
They come out mid-April to mid-May. Peak emergence averages 23 April. A few warm days in a row is all it takes.
So: a warm spring morning, snakes newly out and basking on dark rock. I could not have picked a better day to put my hand on that ledge.
And here is the part that has stayed with me. If that den is ancestral — and the ones that get studied have been continuously occupied for as long as anyone has been watching — then the snakes that rattled at me were the direct descendants of snakes that were in those same rocks when somebody stood below with a hammerstone and pecked a squiggle into the basalt.
I am not going to claim those carvings are a warning sign. Nobody knows what they mean and anybody who tells you otherwise is guessing. But whoever made them knew what lived in that rock. They would have had to.
Snakes everywhere
And then it got worse, in an entirely harmless way.
Walking back down the trail to the bike there were seed pods on the ground. Some grass or weed, dried out, and when you stepped on one or brushed it aside it made a little rattle. Loose seeds in a dry papery pod.
So the whole way down: rattle. Rattle. Every few steps, from the ground, from the plants, from everywhere.
I knew perfectly well they were seed pods. It did not help even slightly.
Not an accident of language
Several Great Basin plants have inflated dry pods with loose seeds inside — the milkvetches especially. The common names people gave them are rattleweed, rattlepod, rattlebox.
Whoever named them was walking through the same country having the same morning I was.
There could be snakes literally anywhere
I had lunch at the bike, then back out along the old road, past the cat litter quarry, over the freeway overpass, and onto the river trail.
And I rode the whole way home thinking there could be snakes literally anywhere.
Which, in fairness, was not paranoia. I suspect there really were rattlesnakes and whatever else absolutely everywhere out there. I am sure of it. I had just spent the morning being shown that the desert looks empty and is not.
So I was cautious in a way I had not been on the way out, with newly increased snake vision and a level of vigilance that lasted several hours.
Back down Virginia Street. A Foster’s, probably. Or across to the bar at the back of Bavarian World, and Hans, and telling him what had just happened out there.
He would have understood it. He was about the only one who would.
What I actually took home
The bike held up fine. It always did. Just one more of the many adventures the Paragon and I went on.
But the thing about the vigilance is that it never entirely switched off.
I am writing this at a dining room table in Lakewood, Washington, thirty years later, and I cannot help thinking there could be a snake right here under it. Which is absolutely crazy. There is not. But that is the feeling, and it is still available to me instantly, and it came from one morning on one rock pile east of Sparks.
What I remember most is the sound of that first one going across the rock. Then all the others. Then realizing they were under the ground I was standing on, and had been the whole time I was up there admiring the artwork.
And the deep silence of that desert, and the wind, always the wind. And the carvings, and the fact that a message pecked into basalt by somebody I will never know anything about had arrived intact, that morning, and I had understood it perfectly.
I know they are still out there. Even now. Even as I write this.
The Snake Den
Pah Pah Range · east of Sparks