"Swimming to Pyramid" Pyramid Travelogue by mcpangie

After tubing around the lake, we jumped out at the "Stone Mother and Her Basket" and went swimming from the beach in this cove over to the Pyramid Island.

There is an ancient Piaute legend about the stone mother. A very long time ago, there was a woman whose children fought all the time. This upset her, so she sat in the desert and cried. Her tears eventually filled Pyramid Lake and she was turned to stone.

I have actually lengthened this story that I got from...

http://www.pyramidlakefisheries.org/stonemother.html

I found a picture of this area that is only about 100 years old on the Internet, and the tufa erodes so quickly that the "Stone Mother" in the form that looks like a woman sitting over a basket seems fairly recent. I'll have to go to the museum at Pyramid Lake one of these days when they aren't experiencing an electricy outage and find out just how old this ancient tale is.

You can find more about rocks with stories at Alaska Mountains.

Lake Bottom

One of the reasons you can tell the tufa formations erode fast is you can hear them tinkling as they fall into the water. Another reason is that when you are wading around this cove, the shards aren't all that comfortable on bare feet.

But still it was like playing in the ocean. The lake is salty sweet because there is no escape from Pyramid except evaporation. This lake is the Truckee River Sink, where Lake Tahoe up in the Sierra Nevadas ends up.

The geology of the area is absolutely fascinating. Besides the Stone Mother's round basket, in the cove there here were all sorts of bubble-shaped rocks breaking apart.

Pyramid Lake is home of many tufa formations.

This picture doesn't do this rock justice.

Mini-Me

Here is a picture of my father's boat testing the "Mini-Me" trolling motor he bought for fishing.

I was swimming to Pyramid when I took this picture, quite a bit faster than the boat.

Fremont's Pyramid

You try taking a picture while swimming! My sister-in-law took this one of me without dunking. This picture doesn't quite show the flag someone planted on top of the pyramid. We decided that our swimming over to the island was as much a feat as climbing the crumbling rock face of the island. The island seemed to be getting farther, and farther away. My dad teased us that we weren't quite ready for the English Channel. The water near the shore was warm, but the deep water was cool.

Spider Rock

Below Pryamid is a rock covered with cobwebs full of these huge spiders the size of chickens! Okay, not chickens, but I still nick-named named the rock "Spider Rock". The chickens were my sister-in-law and I. There was no way that we were going to get up on the rocks with all those huge hanging spiders. We heard somewhere that the spiders are capable of jumping!

In the picture you can't see the spiders. I was using one of those water-tight disposable cameras and they just don't have good resolution. But in September 2003 I took better pictures.