Talk:Smoke Creek Desert

THE ORIGIN OF THE NAME "SMOKE CREEK DESERT" Boy! I have been looking for this for many months, and found very little of use. One hotel in Reno had a "Nevada History" page up where the author made the claim that his research showed that the Smoke Creek Desert was named for the creek. This has some validity since Lassen and Roop both scouted trails from the Honey Lake Valley (Susanville, Janesville, Lichfield, California area) to find a quicker way into Northern California and Southern Oregon. That page has been impossible for me to find when I sat down to write. I lived in the area for about 25 years and heard BOTH the hot springs condensation in winter ("cold") or the dust devils in summer (wind) versions -- and having observed the desert under both conditions each can be valid. I have not been able to find any other printed reference on the web which supports the Winter-Summer origins. I may have read some journal entries while I lived there, or seen printed references in other books -- but I was reading only for my own interest, and well before Wiki or even the Internet (pre-web) being widely available in the area. I hope someone can help out here.

The Section on railroads was very open and shut until I ran across the ECV page which mentioned the Nevada, California, Oregon Railroad. It is VERY possible that the NCO is the rail line which runs along the edge of Pyramid Lake and never extended beyond Sand Pass. The maps showing the Western Pacific as the builder of the Rail line along the Eastern edge I believe to be the most valid. But the ECV mention of the NCO rail line had to be mentioned since they may have STARTED to lay the bed, and Western Pacific took over before they finished, forcing the NCO to move westward over the Madaline Plains. I simply don't know -- but I thought it had to be mentioned since it was a possibility.

Hope someone can straighten this out!-- thanks! Pgalioni (talk) 00:34, 1 October 2011 (UTC)