A bulldozer at the construction site of Marlette Lake Dam on June 12, with views of Marlette Lake.
Photo by Scott Neuffer.
A six-mile drive up a dirt road in a state truck, through a tapestry of aspen and alder leaves, revealed a complex, multimillion-dollar public works project at the edge of Marlette Lake.
The June 12 trip was a convoy of sorts, not only state trucks but those from Granite Construction winding through high canyons of the Carson Range to meet workers and machinery already at the site. The Nevada State Public Works Division spent years preparing for the moment, that is, for actual reconstruction of the Marlette Lake Dam to preserve a treasured resource and stave off disaster.
“The Marlette Dam itself is an earthen structure,” said Brian Wacker, deputy administrator of SPWD. “I always chuckle when I talk about dams. I know there’s a lot of engineering that goes into them. But it’s just a pile of dirt that keeps the water back. It’s a 33-foot-high structure. It’s been there since the 1870s. It’s part of the original system, so I always think about that. How do people build these things up here 150 years ago. It’s harder. I don’t think they had the power tools that Granite Construction has got today. I’d like to think there’s less permits.”
Wacker and Chelsea Cluff, project manager for Lumos & Associates, spoke before the trip in the tall pines near Spooner Lake. They joined other state officials, including workers from the Marlette Lake Water System, and personnel from Granite Construction in turning shovels in a symbolic pile of dirt. It was a groundbreaking at lower elevation as organizers recognized such a ceremony at nearly 8,000 feet might prove difficult.
“In case you don’t know, Marlette Lake Water System was constructed in 1873 to deliver water to Virginia City,” said Wacker. “It is a very interesting facility. I don’t know anything else like it in the world.”
Wacker informed the small gathering in the woods that the state of Nevada bought the water system in 1963 for $1.65 million. The system still supplies water to Virginia City and to Carson City. In a previous interview, Carson City Public Works told the Appeal the city can get up to 2,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Marlette system but has been treating half or less of that due to water quality and needed upgrades to the Quill Treatment Plant.
“It’s the only water source for Virigina City, so it is very important for those guys,” Wacker said. “The system overall includes Marlette Lake, Hobart Reservoir, the east slope catchment system, and the way it basically operates is it collects water from these different sources. It comes to a place called diversion dam where it enters a pipeline. The pipeline collects water, and it heads east toward Lakeview. You can almost see it from Washoe Lake if you know where to look. But that’s where the inverted siphon starts.”
Wacker said the Carson City pipeline uses gravity flow, while the inverted siphon to Storey County “makes this system special.” It was installed in the 1870s and still works.
“There are sections of the pipeline that are original, that are 150 years old. There have been some sections replaced. The favorite way I like to hear people talk about it is some people ask how do you find a leak in the pipeline, and the answer is on that inverted siphon, you don’t find a leak; it comes out of the ground at hundreds of psi. It usually makes its own hole,” Wacker said. “When you come into Carson City on I-580, there’s a white house on the side of the freeway, that’s right at Duck Hill. That’s the old watermaster’s house, and that’s where the siphon crosses underneath the freeway.”
The Nevada Division of Water Resources found seepage within the Marlette Lake Dam in 2017. A 2024 FEMA assessment showed a high probability of dam failure in a 6.5 earthquake or bigger, a breach that could damage State Route 28 between the Marlette area and Lake Tahoe.
“Without this project, our dam is at risk of catastrophic failure, partially due to the age of the embankment,” Cluff told the crowd at Spooner. “In the 1870s, we didn’t have ways to hit compaction the way we do now. So catastrophic failure would be the loss of a major water resource, critical biological habitat, and the debris could impact Lake Tahoe clarity, which is part of the reason why this project is so important.”
Asked if dam failure was dangerous to human life, Cluff said, “The goal is to make it not.”
Wacker said the dam was raised in 1959 and impounds almost 12,000 acre-feet of water. The lake has become a brood stock source for rainbow and Lahontan cutthroat trout managed by the Nevada Department of Wildlife. It’s a popular recreational destination, accessible by the Tahoe Rim Trail and Flume Trail.
“Public work construction always takes longer than a lot of people think, and this project in particular takes even longer because of the special things that have to happen to make this thing go,” Wacker said.
Total project costs are more than $23 million, he said, with $10 million of federal grant funding from FEMA and the rest coming from the state. Wacker thanked state departments working together. Several trails in the area have been closed for construction, which is expected to be completed by the fall of 2026.
Besides environmental permitting, the historical site is located within Tahoe Regional Planning Agency jurisdiction. Wacker said the project has needed “every permit you can think of.”
Cluff pointed to the significant amount of snowfall the dam site gets.
“We’ve only recently been able to access it, so currently we have our cofferdams in place. What those are are small dams in front of the actual dam that we will use to dam the water in the lake and dry out our forebay area for construction,” she said. “Prior to our mobilization, the water surface elevation in the lake was drawn down approximately 20 feet, and we did that in partnership with the Marlette Lake Water System. And we still do have about 22 feet of water in the lake. But the reason we had to do that is we can’t go in with 50 cofferdams. It’s a hard location to access and bring those dams up to.”
The shoreline of the lake was exposed at the construction site on June 12. In some areas, old tree stumps jutted from shallow water. Workers walked on the cofferdams, which looked like parts of a giant sunken bounce house. Marlette Lake was still deep enough to maintain that blue quality of Sierra lakes, Lake Tahoe itself shimmering to the west.
The location induced a near dream state, if not from the altitude than from the sheer physical beauty of the area. As state officials mingled with construction workers, everyone in a hard hat, stories were passed back and forth: tales of Comstockers riding logs down the old flume, of a helicopter once landing in a snowstorm to service the dam outlet.
Not so alluring was the earthen dam itself, the small hill of rock and dirt that Granite Construction would have to move to install new piping and equipment. One could imagine pioneer types rolling boulders from adjacent slopes in the formative days of the dam. Their work lay like a riddle to a modern crew facing a pre-winter deadline.
“So over the 2025 season, what we’re going to be doing is excavating our main embankment, going to the existing outlet conduits,” Cluff said at Spooner Lake. “We have riveted steel pipe that is slowly but surely decaying in our embankment. Once they remove those, they will install a new outlet conduit, rebuild the existing embankment, install what we call a filter drain – which as you can imagine water flows through dirt, so that filter drain will collect and safely convey any seepage through the dam — and then we’re going to extend the dam about three feet and add a buttress fill to further stabilize our embankment.”
That main reconstruction (trying to use as much original earth material as possible) had a pressing deadline because “we can’t winterize those cofferdams,” said Cluff.
“And then next year we will come back and wrap up some of the more ancillary stuff that we can finish after the embankment is built, including we’re going to have a building on the top of the dam with our controls, and other smaller items,” she said.
At the worksite, Ryan Murray, Granite’s project manager, looked determined when talking about the buttress fill totaling around 8,500 tons. Plans were to truck it from Carson City.
“Seventy days of hauling,” Murray said.
At the worksite, an archeologist contracted for the project discussed a dump pile dating back to the early 20th century. Rusted metal cans were visible on the south bank of Marlette Creek. The archeologist told the Appeal the material would be reburied after construction as no collection is permitted. The rubbish pile evoked a bygone camaraderie, workers testing their resolve against the mountain elements.
Cluff said Marlette Lake would likely refill over the next six years, naturally. It sees about three feet of recharge a year.
“My disclaimer is the rate of actual recharge is highly dependent on future weather patterns and the amount of winter snowpack, and as I am not a fortune teller, I can just only use calculations,” she said.
Wacker had also said something memorable by Spooner Lake, when talking about temporary disruption to recreation.
“The reason were doing it is it’s going to make the dam stronger,” he said, “and it’s going to be something that we’re going to have for our future generations.”
More information is available at publicworks.nv.gov/Services/Buildings_and_Grounds/Marlette_Lake_Water_System_Improvement_Projects/.