Marlette Lake Water System, Water supply system in Virginia City, Nevada, US.
The Marlette Lake Water System is a historic water supply network in the mountains near Virginia City, Nevada, made up of dams, reservoirs, flumes, and pipelines. The system draws water from Marlette Lake in the Sierra Nevada and moves it across ridges and valleys into the city below.
The system was built in the 1870s and 1880s to supply a fast-growing silver mining town that had outpaced every local water source. Parts of it were updated over the decades, but the overall layout has remained largely the same since the late 19th century.
The system kept an entire mining community alive in a desert mountain setting, and its structures are still visible across the landscape today. Walking among the remaining flumes and dams gives a sense of how dependent the town was on this network for basic survival.
The site sits in mountain terrain, so sturdy footwear is a good idea when visiting the scattered structures. The area is large and the structures are spread out, so setting aside plenty of time will help you take in the full scale of the network.
One section of the network uses a pipe siphon that pushes water under pressure through deep valleys rather than over them. This relied on basic physics principles that, at this scale and in this setting, were rarely applied in the American West at the time.
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