Walker Lake reprieve is only temporary

Walker Lake has received a temporary reprieve, thanks to a transfer by the Nevada Department of Wildlife of water from a wildlife area, but it needs more than that. Time is rapidly running out on a living, ecologically self-supporting lake.

The lake level is dropping 4 feet a year and has been declining for most of the century. Alarmingly, of 113,000 Lahontan cutthroat trout stocked into Walker Lake earlier this year, perhaps 8 percent survived. The salinity level, some people fear, gives the lake not much more than a year before it can't support fish.

It's unthinkable that Walker Lake would die. If this were Lake Tahoe, people would be up in arms around the country to defend the jewel of the Sierra Nevada.

But it's not Tahoe. It's not ringed by pine forests, or billionaires' homes, or high-rise casino resorts. Walker Lake is a desert lake, with the small town of Hawthorne on one end and an Indian reservation on the other.

Yet it is no less vital to the livelihoods of the people around Walker Lake and water users upstream on the Walker River. That's why the Walker River Working Group has for a couple of years tried to come up with solutions to the pending demise of the lake that would threaten neither wildlife nor human dependence on the water.

The fact is that the Walker River is overappropriated by approximately 40 percent. That means in many years, all water is diverted from the river before it reaches the lake. Only in wet years - which haven't happened lately - does it receive even a trickle.

The solutions are many - conservation, purchase of some water rights, temporary storage upstream during wet years - and it will likely require a combination of all to begin to restore Walker Lake. Mother Nature, of course, could do her part too.

We can only hope Walker Lake has reached its nadir. But the Wildlife Department's water won't last long, so some permanent solutions need to start flowing.