December 2022

EDITOR'S NOTE

A Donner Christmas carol: despair and a moment of joy

As the first snows of winter sweep across Donner Summit, rush over Sier ra lakes and tumble down the Truckee River Canyon into Reno, my thoughts always turn to the Donner Party.

I initially researched their tragedy for a newspaper series to mark the 150th anniversary of the pioneers’ 2,000-mile walk across the continent and entrap ment in the Sierra Nevada during the terrible winter of 1846-47. After the se ries morphed into a book in 1997, I thought I was done hanging out with those unfortunate emigrants.

Instead, the pioneer families have remained my close neighbors for more than two decades. I’ve taught classes, given lectures, appeared on TV documentaries, monitored archeological digs, pored over newly discovered documents and led tours of their trail and camp sites. That’s because the Donners’ story, like the sinking of the Titanic or the Battle of Little Big Horn, is an iconic part of American history.

Even absent the horror of cannibal ism, the tale is more fascinating than any novel. It has heroism and depravity; kindness and cruelty; lonely deaths; last-minute rescues; and—above all—re demption. People can’t get enough of it.

Perhaps no part of the narrative illustrates the contrasts of the ordeal than the events of Christmas Day in 1846. On Dec. 25, the entrapped families huddled and prayed, shivered and wept. One mother surprised her children with a holiday “feast” of scraps of food she had squirreled away for the occasion. Just for a moment, joy visited the mountain.

This month’s cover story gives readers a peek inside those ramshackle shelters on that Christmas 176 years ago and conjures the voices of those doomed pioneers. On that day, spring seemed an impossible dream, but hope perched like a star above the families’ hovels. The storm broke after midnight; moonlight glittered like gems atop the beautiful, deep and deadly snow.

Happy holidays!

LETTERS

The U.S. needs universal health care

When I was working at a hospital in Truckee years ago, I met a young woman with severe abdominal pain. She was sobbing. I drew her blood for the tests that were ordered, and I asked her why she was crying. She told me she did not know how she was going to pay for her ER visit. She said she worked very hard but had no insurance. I was over whelmed. That stuck with me to this day. She would be charged the full amount the hos pital charged, and her debt would be sent to collections. Nothing has changed. We could do what the other industrialized nations do. I don’t think America cares.

Don McKechnie Sparks

The state Health Department fails Nevadans

I remember the Fallon leukemia cluster and the state’s failure to deal with it. I, too, am not surprised that the State Health Depart ment is in worse shape now (RN&R, No vember 2022) than it was then. My relatives were state employees, so I know that Neva

da budgets the way people play Whack-a-Mole: The state throws money at agencies who aren’t able to do their jobs and then takes the money away when another agency is found wanting.

As long as Nevada relies on sales taxes to make ends meet, we’ll never fund agencies properly and will always be a “Third World” state. Make the big industries like casinos and mining pay their fair share, and we will be able to pay for the services we so badly need.

Malcolm O’Brian Sparks

The GOP manufactures hatred

Republicans argue inflation is due to Democrat spending and policies. It makes a good bumper sticker, but it’s not founded in facts.

The inflation caused by emergency spending during COVID was known by the Democrats to be potentially inflationary, but it kept people afloat and alive during the very real pandemic that Republicans ignored and denied. The Dem ocrats wanted to manage that small inflationary bump, but those plans got voted down by two rogue Democrats and all the Republicans, who planned to use the failure they created to whip up outrage for the midterms.

Democrats, without a veto-proof majority in the Senate, have done a lot for working Ameri

cans in just two years. Republicans spent the time making people hate and/or fear each other. Repub licans don’t believe in government. Why would anyone believe they can or want to govern?

Mike Rottmann Virginia City Highlands

Celebrating Nevada passing the ERA

Nevadans for Equal Rights is thrilled to see the overwhelming show of support from voters across the Silver State in favor of equality finally being enshrined in our State constitution. Supporters, volunteers and member organizations across all 17 counties have watched as their hard work and dedication have led to extra protections for all Nevadans, particularly those most directly impacted by discrimination, who’ve been told they must work twice as hard for the same oppor tunities. Nevadans have decisively rejected hate and unequivocally declared that our differences should be celebrated and protected under law.

Victories like these do not happen in a vacu um. Nevadans for Equal Rights’ efforts centered on communities that are too-often overlooked and engaged the community organizations that support and uplift them.

Nnedi Stephens Reno

—FRANK X. MULLEN frankm@renonr.com

BY RITA LUIKART

Climate change and air pollution endanger the oceans—and the whole planet

Most people have heard about climate change, the current distortion in our world’s temperature and weather.

Rising temperatures, caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, affect our weather. The CO2 is produced by burning fossil fuels, including coal and gasoline. Carbon dioxide comes out of internal combustion engines, including cars and trucks, and is produced by burning the gas that is used for cooking or in outdoor fireplaces.

Time is running out for us to take action to control climate change. The lon ger we wait, the worse conditions will be in the future. This con cerns me, because as a 13-year-old, I worry what the planet will be like when my generation moves to adulthood.

Climate change is already damaging our world in many ways. The world’s oceans are among its main victims of the global-warming trend. As the planet gets hotter, our oceans are absorbing the higher temperatures and sucking up carbon dioxide, which hurts the animals and their ecosystems that have always thrived there. For example, jellyfish and porpoises are already strongly affected.

Warmer temperatures mean larger breeding and living areas for jellyfish. This sounds like a positive effect, but it not only means that more people are more likely to get stung, but larger jellyfish populations will have a negative effect on other ocean species. Porpoises and orcas are directly affected in a negative way. Fossil fuels from boats and sewage pipelines spill into their home waters, creating a dangerous environment.

Our waste also harms the seas. Dolphins can become tangled in old nets and hooks. More plastic than you can imagine crowds our oceans. The waste plastic and other garbage can come from trash dumps, litter blown out to sea, or even from your own backyard. Sea turtles eat plastic bags when they mistake them for jellyfish. Waste plastic, such as water bottles, shrinks over time and breaks apart. The tiny particles become micro-plastics, which are a danger to sea life, because whales or fish may eat them, thinking the plastic fragments are krill or shrimp. We eat the seafood and the plastic inside of them.

Both climate change and trash are very dan gerous, not only to the animals of our oceans, but to us as well. In dividuals can help the problem by doing some simple things, such as not allowing water containing fertilizer to flow into storm drains. Use recyclable bags for shopping; avoid plastic bags and water bot tles. You can also help by not littering or leaving garbage behind; if you see trash on the ground (tiny plastic included), please, pick it up. Nevadans can work with a local organi zation like Keep Tahoe Blue to clean our local spaces and do other service work.

My generation will inherit the planet. We’d like to be able to live on it, and enjoy the oceans and the environment as it is naturally supposed to be. Both children and adults can help make sure that climate change and waste don’t forever make the Earth unlivable.

But the clock is ticking.

STREETALK

Asked at Laughing Planet, 941 N. Virginia St., Reno

Matt Means UNR Honors College dean

BY DAVID ROBERT

I’d give the gift of hope. It can be as simple as one sen tence of encouragement. You don’t know what someone is going through; everyone has a story. We’ve all collectively been through a lot in the past two years. You never want to deprive someone of hope; that may be all they have.

Rita Luikart, 13, is in the eighth-grade at Mountain View Montessori School in Reno.

I would give my mom the gift of everlasting love, and have those around her show her love. She wasn’t allowed to celebrate any holidays when she was growing up be cause of her parents’ religious beliefs, so I’d spend quality time with her and give her the gift of memories.

Izzy Norwood Coordinator Tawanda Logan Registered nurse

I’d give the gift of knowledge. I’d give it to my entire fam ily and my close friends. I’m a nurse, so I give knowledge a lot—just life knowledge in general. I give knowledge to people to help in their own situations. I recently encouraged someone to seek help and not to wait until it’s too late.

Jake Schein Student

My best friend loves vintage Nevada retro stuff. She just loves Nevada; she grew up in Nevada and thinks that it’s the best place ever to live. She calls herself a “stateriot,”and not a “patriot.” I got her a ’70s-’80s retro UNR bomber jacket at a shop in Midtown. She’s going to love it.

Colby Sunderland Graphic designer

My gift would be a shared experience. Instead of giving someone a present, I’d take them out for a full day of activ ities. I’d take my brother up to the mountains to go skiing. He lives in Portland, and it’d be cool to show him one of Lake Tahoe’s resorts. Memories are a far more valuable present than anything.

What would you give as a gift, if you could give anything?

GUEST COMMENT

NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

| BY JIMMY BOEGLE

After a 2022 rebirth, looking forward to 2023

It’s been one hell of a 2022 for the Reno News & Review

Heading into 2022, the publication was in a very different situation—in almost every way. Its owners were unsure of the paper’s future, as it limped along online. Frank X. Mullen, Johnathan L. Wright and a small handful of freelancers were doing great work, but the publication was hemorrhaging money.

When my company took control of the RN&R on Jan. 31, 2022, we knew we had a busy, complicated road ahead. Beyond Frank and Johnathan, virtually everything else about the newspaper needed to be rebuilt. Because the RN&R and its former sister papers used the same base website and URL, we had to start over with a new address, RenoNR.com. We had to build an entirely new website from scratch, and then figure out how to peel off nearly 22 years of archives from the former site, and get it successfully integrated into the new one.

We also had to rebuild our writers’ base, especially when Johnathan left his part-time RN&R gig for a full-time job writing for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I started reaching

out to many former RN&R scribes and asked them to come back; thankfully, a number of them did, including Bob Grimm, Jessica Santina, Kris Vagner, Todd South, Matt Bieker and our former editor, Brad Bynum. (Note to Todd and Brad: We hope you come back soon!) We’ve also been fortunate to add a number of talented newcomers as we’ve made our comeback.

Then we had to address the question of whether we’d ever return to print. It was an unbelievably difficult decision for us, because, well, print ing newspapers these days is unbelievably difficult. The last printer in our region closed ear lier this year, and as a result, the other local papers are printed in Chico or Tracy, Calif., and shipped over the mountains—at a time when newsprint and transportation costs are at all-time highs.

Once we did make the decision to return to print on a monthly basis, we had to take a 26-month-old distribution list and do a two-

month audit to see what distribution spots we had left, and what racks, news boxes, etc. remained. We knew ordering new racks was out of the question for now, because of the sky-high costs of steel and transportation, so we had to make due with what we had.

Finally, and arguably most importantly, we had to stop losing thousands of dollars each month. We made a push to get as many of our old advertisers back, and add as many new ones as possible. We’ve done OK—not as well as I’d like, but OK. (If you’re a former ad vertiser who is not back in our pages yet … what in the heck are you waiting for?)

Now, as 2022 heads toward a conclusion, and we start looking at 2023, the Reno News & Review is in a decent place. It’s almost hard for me to believe how far we’ve come since Jan. 31.

If you’re reading this in print, you’re holding our seventh issue back in print as a monthly, 25,000 copies of which are available at 700

locations across Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Minden, Gardnerville, Truckee and Tahoe. If you’re reading this online, you’re looking at our fantastic all-new website, where our archives going back to 2000 are available, for free, to all. (We’re still cleaning some things up with the website, but it’s all there.) We’re producing nearly as much content as we were before the pandemic arrived, and, much to my relief, we’re breaking even on the financial side, or close to it, thanks to our advertisers and a whole lot of you generous readers.

If all goes according to plan, 2023 will be almost as important to the RN&R as was 2022. As we continue to produce hard-hitting, compel ling local journalism, we will start a behind-thescenes effort to make sure what happened to the RN&R in 2020 never happens again. Our goal is to eventually make the RN&R a nonprofit, with a board of directors tasked with raising enough money for us to add staff, boost our budget and make sure our future is completely sustainable.

Thanks to you, dear readers, for sticking with us—and for helping us make a comeback unparalleled by any other newspaper in the United States.

UPFRONT

Election deniers lose; the Big Lie marches on

Local election denier and political activist Robert Beadles and/or his political action committees donated money to at least 25 candidates for statewide or local offices—but just three who accepted the money won their races.

No matter: Beadles is doubling down on his allegations that Nevada’s elections are rigged.

Statewide candidates who claimed that elections are fixed in favor of Democrats lost, a trend seen nation wide. In local races, incumbent Jeanne Herman, whom Beadles’ supported, will retain her seat on the Washoe County Commission. Herman last year backed an unsuccessful proposal to require hand-counting of ballots and other major changes in elections.

Mike Clark also won his race for a seat on the commission, and Ken Gray will be the next assemblyman in District 39 (Lyon and Douglas counties). Both candidates accepted donations from Beadles, according to campaign-finance reports, but neither publically disputed the results of the 2020 elections.

Election denier Jim Marchant lost his bid for Nevada secretary of state, as did every election denier who cam paigned for that office in other states.

Adam Laxalt, who was Nevada’s top salesman for Donald Trump’s lie that he was the real winner of the 2020 presidential contest, lost to incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

With nearly all election deniers going down to defeat in Nevada and across the nation, commentators theorized that voters were disgusted by their false and repeatedly debunked claims of election fraud. But Beadles, who said he donated to more than 50 candidates in Nevada and other states, said that those losing candidates actually won their races, because the midterm elec tions also were rigged.

“What we see is massive election fraud in broad daylight (obvious) to any critical thinker,” he wrote in an email to the RN&R. “We hope to truly expose it soon. The majority of people celebrating the alleged wins of these Marxist candidates who have been destroying our county-state are truly celebrating communism.”

—Frank X. Mullen

A roof, barely

High rents and a sagging economy force some Nevadans to live in their vehicles

As winter arrives, some folks lacking stable housing head for homeless shelters, while others hunker down in a van or recreational vehicle parked on city streets.

That’s what Mona, 73 and John, 82, are doing. The couple has been living in an RV parked on Reno streets for more than two years. They bought the motor home for about $200 when they couldn’t find housing together.

Mona and John are Social Security recipients who said they were pushed out of their homes by the steeply rising cost of housing in the Reno area. Living in the camper was the only suitable option if they wanted to get off the streets, Mona said.

“We’ve given so much and have worked all our lives, raising kids and grandkids, and this is where we are,” she said.

They have been able to renovate some parts of the camper to make it more livable during the winter months. They’ve added better insulation to the walls. They have a propane space heater they use sparingly, only when the temperature drops so low

that blankets alone won’t keep away the cold.

Living in the vehicle is tiresome, Mona said. To supplement their Social Security and disability checks, they occasionally sell some of their belongings. Still, they said they are grateful that they have a roof, albeit a thin one, over their heads.

Other nomads, like Jody, 45 and Tony, 46, tough out the winter living in cars or trucks. Jody and Tony reside in a white Chevrolet S-10 pickup filled with the belongings they’ve been able to keep. That’s a step down from where they were living last year, when the couple lived in a recreational vehicle they had purchased with winnings from a run of luck at a Reno casino. They also had several applianc es that made the motor home a more comfort able abode.

Their good fortune ended after an acquain tance stole the RV and stripped virtually ev erything that could be sold out of it, they said. They started over—again.

“You have to restart so many times, because everything gets taken over and over again by the other homeless people, (or) by the city, you

Jody, 45, is living in a Chevrolet S-10 pickup parked on Reno streets with her partner, Tony, 46. The couple previously lived in a recreational vehicle, but the RV was stolen

know,” Jody said. “I don’t know how many times I restarted, (maybe) 20 or so times.”

Being able to buy food and gas is also a problem. They have a limited ability to store perishable food, and skyrocketing gas prices deplete their budget. They try to move their car as little as possible.

That’s a problem, because they have to move their car every few days or risk being charged with a parking violation, another extra expense they can’t afford. Other people who live in their vehicles face the same dilemma.

James, 65, who lives in his vehicle, said it’s easiest to stay around industrial areas near the river, rather than near residential areas where neighbors are apt to call the police. James typically stays in an area of Sparks where he is less likely to be face parking violations.

James said he has been homeless for nearly 10 years. He has stayed at the shelter on Record Street and lived for years at the Re no-Sparks Gospel Mission, where he worked as a volunteer.

James was recently diagnosed with throat cancer and has been treated with chemotherapy and radiation, which he said caused a range of side effects. Those included an inflamed tongue, sores all over his mouth and a general feeling of weakness. He said he has since stopped treatment, because he’d rather be en joying his time than suffering through the aw ful effects of the treatment. His truck, he said, is more comfortable than a homeless shelter.

Local authorities keep an eye out for people living in vehicles.

“We do enforce any normal parking infrac tion,” said Alex Woodley, the director of park ing and code enforcement for the city of Reno. “… We have to do that regardless of whether someone is in the car or not.”

There’s a line between citing unoccupied vehicles and those with people living inside. Woodley noted the city takes a hands-off ap proach when it comes to people living in their vehicles. He cited a 2014 ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned a 1983 Los Angeles law prohibiting the use of a car as living quarters.

Cities within the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction, like Reno, need to rethink their ordinances pro hibiting the ability to use vehicles for sleeping or living purposes, Woodley said. Reno has such a law on the books, but after the court’s ruling eight years ago, police stopped citing people who are using their vehicles as shelter.

and wrecked. Photo/Matthew Berrey

Woodley said officers don’t seek out people living in vehicles, but do follow up on citizen complaints about abandoned vehicles on city streets.

Woodley said the city doesn’t keep a running count of the number of people living in vehicles. The area’s annual point-in-time count, an annual tabulation of individuals in the area who are experiencing degrees of homelessness or unstable housing, in February tallied 1,188 people in shelters or transitional housing and 417 living on the streets, in parks or along the Truckee River. The survey didn’t note how many were living in vehicles.

Woodley said the city receives around 7,000 complaints a year from residents about vehicles being abandoned or used as living quarters. When complaints come in about people living in parked RVs or other vehicles, city officials tell the concerned citizens that the practice isn’t illegal. At the same time, Woodley said, parking enforcement officers tell vehicle-dwellers about available social services in the area.

Woodley said Reno Police Department’s Mobile Outreach Safety Team pairs officers with clinicians to help those who may need mental health assistance. Compliance officers also can reach out to the department’s commu nity action officers (CAO) for help.

That team, however, has a bad reputation among many homeless people. Two years ago, during widespread “sweeps” of homeless camps when the new homeless shelter opened in Reno, some community action officers were accused of being overly aggressive with the people in the camps. RPD Officer Ryan Gott, for example, was the subject of media reports alleging that he abused and belittled unhoused people during a June 2020 sweep of

an encampment near Wells Avenue in Reno. ThisIsReno.com posted a video from a police body camera that showed Gotts screaming at people inside the encampment and using a knife to slash open a tent.

On RPD’s website, Gotts remains listed as a member of the CAO team, patrolling and responding to calls in the south of Reno.

Woodley emphasized that the city’s goal is to provide unhoused people with options to connect with services and get help. Parking enforcement officers don’t carry guns or hand cuffs and are often seen by homeless people as less threatening than police officers. The idea, he said, is to avoid harassing people and to direct them to services or agencies.

One partial solution to getting people living in vehicles off the streets is to designate some parking lots as safe havens. There, they have access to amenities including electricity, bath rooms and showers, without having to worry about piling up parking citations. Some cities have had success with that approach. In Santa Barbara, Calif., for example, those parking lots are used in connection with a counseling center called New Beginnings. That program began in 2004.

Woodley said there have been conversations among officials about starting a similar pro gram at the Cares Campus, but no action has been taken thus far.

In the meantime, officials speculate that the sagging economy, high rents and the destruc tion of weekly rental motels will increase the number of unhoused people in the Truckee Meadows. This winter may find a lot more people living in cars, trucks, vans and RVs. As long as some unhoused people are reluctant to go to the Cares shelter, living in vehicles will remain an option for housing of last resort.

Sheep-napping:

On the night of Nov. 1, statues of a sheep and a lamb were stolen from the Basque heritage area at Rancho San Rafael Park in Reno, where they have delighted children for the past 15 years. The statues are made of fiberglass; the large sheep is about 4 feet tall and weighs about 50 pounds. Vandals broke the bolts that affixed the statues to their bases and carried them away. Park officials are asking that the sheep be returned with “no questions asked.” Anyone with information about the lost lambs may call the park office at 775-785-4512.

James, 65, lives in his Ford F-150 pickup and often parks for the night in an industrial area of Sparks.

Photo/Matthew Berrey

Have ewe seen these lost lambs?

A sense of place

A city survey reveals what everyone already knows about downtown Reno

The results of a San Francisco consulting firm’s survey of 2,700 people who voiced opinions about downtown Reno confirmed what residents and visitors have known about the area for decades—but failed to ask about one of downtown’s key issues.

Key findings of the so-called “place making” survey were that the number of pedestrians on Virginia Street was much lower than expected. The survey also noted that residents often avoid the area unless they are going to an event. Many residents who responded said they shun downtown because they feel unsafe in the city’s core, and because there is a lack of places to rest.

Ky Plaskon, president of the Truckee Meadows Bicycle Alliance, said the survey’s findings probably are common knowl edge among Reno residents. The survey, conducted by the consulting firm Gehl, was touted by city officials as a way to help plan the future of the downtown core and

Virginia Street after a long-planned bicycle-lane project on Center Street was put on hold. The delay (and possible demise) of the Center Street project came after The ROW casinos—the Eldorado, the Silver Legacy and Circus Circus, all Caesar’s Entertainment properties—asked the Regional Transportation Commission to consider a bike track on Virginia Street instead.

Plaskon was disappointed with the lack of public involvement and representation from The ROW on the project. The problems on Virginia Street that Gehl identified, including empty storefronts, blank walls and a lack of places to rest, are deliberate design choices, he said: Casinos have preserved those design failings as a way to incentivize tourists and residents to get off Virginia Street and go inside the casinos, he claimed.

“The casinos have succeeded in making the heart of our city a ghost town, and the fact that they aren’t at these placemaking meetings shows that they have no intention of changing

that,” Plaskon said. “The public and our local businesses should recognize that one company is being allowed to ruin our city and demand that they come to the table.”

The survey didn’t ask about the bike-lane controversy, Plaskon noted, but he said it’s pos sible to make Virginia Street more bike-friendly and car-friendly at the same time. However, he believes the Center Street plan is the more viable option for a bike lane in downtown that would connect the University of Nevada, Reno, with Midtown. A safe track for bikes is essential in the downtown area, he said.

“If I’m downtown, and there’s a bike path there, and people are riding by on scooters and bikes, and I get attacked because it’s unsafe, then I have a lot of confidence that people would stop to help me,” Plaskon said. “But people in cars, just driving on through, they’re less likely to get involved. Part of what makes it unsafe is that it’s a place to drive through, not a place to enjoy.”

Toni Harsh, a former Reno City Council member, said the delay of the Center Street project, and delays and cancellations of other city projects, were among the reasons she didn’t attend the placemaking meeting.

“We had so many studies,” Harsh said. “We had study after study after study and had hired consultant after consultant after consultant, and all those studies were just put on the shelf. You take the study; they (report) the results; and nothing comes of it.”

When serving on the council and thereafter, Harsh said she saw many Reno projects even tually fall by the wayside, and that laws passed after careful deliberation were later sidestepped to accommodate developers. For example, she said, the council approved an ordinance restrict ing buildings that would cast large shadows on the downtown area. That “shade” ordinance was a part of the city’s River Plan.

“The River Plan was developed using a lot of expertise, not only in the environment area, but it also had a lot of government officials on it,” Harsh said. “The people who were building the plan were invested, and they’re the ones who would hopefully implement it. A lot of time and effort went into it.”

The shade restriction was waived for a developer in 2019. A subsequent lawsuit alleged the council acted to benefit the construction of a large luxury hotel.

Amy Pennington, the city of Reno’s project manager for the placemaking study, understands the skepticism about the process, but said that Gehl’s effort differs from previous studies and projects, because it is a more “vision-focused”

| BY JESSE STONE

roadmap for revitalizing downtown, rather than just an isolated construction plan.

“In the last five years, so much has changed in our city,” Pennington said. “We need to see where everything’s at. We’ve had lots of new development coming into the downtown area. We’ve had lots of residents coming in. We have new leadership at the university that wants to tie in the university with downtown. There are so many exciting things happening. To come together and get all the stakeholders at the table and have a fresh vision that is representative of where we are now, and where we want to go, is really important.”

After Gehl presented the survey results in November, attendees were asked to complete another survey that presented potential solutions to the concerns identified. The second survey featured a series of pictures of downtown scenes from other U.S. cities. Those results had not been released as of our press deadline.

City officials said the survey data will help planners map the future of Virginia Street downtown.

“The main goal to come out of it is to create a shared future vision for Virginia Street, where all stakeholders in our city are involved in that process,” Pennington said.

Local architect and Cathexes owner Don Clark said the placemaking approach considers the ramifications that a single improvement or renovation can have on the surrounding area and looks beyond the boundaries of single properties.

“I’ve been involved with some development myself along the way in various things that moved with the ebb and flow of the city,” Clark said. “Some have been more successful than others. But the biggest thing that matters to me is creating place. That can come in all sorts of forms. The casinos in the 1960s and 1970s used to be much more open to the street, and there was a lot of interaction for street traffic. What’s happened over time is that things have closed.”

After the information-gathering phase is completed, Gehl will present its design for the improved downtown area to the community, the City Council and the Regional Transporta tion Commission. That phase is expected to be complete in the spring.

Although no specific major improvements were suggested during the first placemaking meeting, Plaskon was encouraged that the con sulting firm mentioned smaller changes, includ ing installing benches on downtown streets.

“There’s this idea of a sense of place, and we all know what that means,” Plaskon said. “There’s no mystery around that. It means people on the street enjoying themselves and feeling safe. I get that city boosters needed a study to say that. We hope that what comes out of it is that we can be like every other city in the world and have a safe downtown—that we can help it recover and turn it into something that everyone wants to hang out with and enjoy.”

The Bonanza Inn is one of several properties downtown that are closed and boarded up. Photo/David Robert

Eco-friendly Christmas

A guide to buying local, recycling, reusing and keeping green

Northern Nevada may or may not see a white Christmas this year, but gift-givers can certainly make the holiday green.

There are plenty of eco-friendly options for shoppers, from buying gifts locally, to making presents. People can cut waste and make recycling a priority.

Start with the Christmas tree: Northern Nevadans have a great opportunity to secure a fresh evergreen while also helping the forest environment. Plus, a tree expedition into the wild often provides unforgettable family memories.

“There is an ecological value to harvesting trees,” said Matt Zumstein, district ranger for Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. “… Thinning out the smaller trees helps the other trees grow big and strong. It also reduces lad der fuels, which helps to mitigate catastrophic crown fires.”

It’s easy to be your own lumberjack Just get a permit from the U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management, online or at field offices, which list areas where the pines may be felled. You’ll get a tag for your tree, and instructions about which trees you can cut, and where you can cut them (limited to federal lands; never private property). The agencies also provide online tips for staying safe in the forest.

Buy gifts locally

To avoid supply-chain issues and high gas prices for shipping this year, think about buy ing your gifts from local sources, including artists, artisans and small local businesses, especially those who use sustainable ingredi ents or components.

The sisters of the Carmel of Reno Mon astery have printed their beautiful Christmas cards for years. See and order the cards at www.carmelofrenocards.com; individual cards are only 85 cents, or a pack of 10 is

$7.50. Because of COVID restrictions, customers who want to buy in person must wear a mask and can only view two racks of cards at the door at 1950 La Fond Drive in Reno—so it’s advisable to order online.

Unique handmade holiday ornaments are featured at the Holiday Treasures show at the Artists Co-op Gallery, founded in 1966. Shop the gallery for art, cards, jewelry, pottery, baskets and woodwork by local artists listed on the website, artistsco-opgalleryreno.com. The show runs through Dec. 30. The gallery is open daily from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 627 Mill St. in Reno and is hosted by the artists themselves.

A chocolate dynasty

A yummy holiday tradition is a box of premium chocolates. Dorinda’s Chocolates, founded by Dorinda Vance and her two sons, opened first in Truckee, Calif., and now operates shops in downtown Reno and at Rancharrah. Their source of chocolate is world-famous Valrhona choco late in France, which imports the raw chocolate from 15 countries. Valrhona strives to promote sustainability through the promotion of fair trade, the rejection of child labor, combatting deforesta tion, improving soil and farming practices, better waste management at their plant and employing other eco-friendly strategies.

Dorinda’s best-seller is a box of 12 sea salt caramels, which costs $22 online. A 12-piece holiday box costs $27.

Dorinda’s at Rancharrah shares its space with another Vance business, Rolled Mountain Cream ery, headed by Dillon Vance. There you will find exotic ice cream flavors like Amy’s Grasshopper, a blend of green-tea matcha, mint and crushed Oreo cookies. The creamery uses no plastic, instead offering wooden spoons and recycled paper cups.

Shun plastic bottles

A new way to store shampoo, conditioner,

laundry soap and other household essentials is to visit a refillery. The first refillery to open in Reno was Replenish in The Basement, a boutique shop in the lower floor of the former downtown Reno post office.

Owner Melinda Brown opened the shop to offer alternatives to single-use plastic bottles. Customers can bring their own containers or purchase glass jars or strong, light aluminum bottles to be refilled with lotions, dish soap, wet/ dry shampoo and soap.

The shop also boasts a collection of eco-friend ly gifts including Swedish dishcloths, dryer balls, cotton fleece napkins and towels. Holiday items include Christmas ornaments made of cotton in candy-cane and reindeer shapes which can be used as dryer balls after the holidays, and reusable Christmas fabric wraps to replace paper wrapping paper. Gift baskets combine several green products such as silicon straws and selfcare items

Another refillery, the Waste Less Shop, has opened at Rancharrah and features a bulk bar refillery where soaps, shampoos, etc. can be customized with essential oils. In addition to glass and aluminum containers, the shop offers handmade ceramic jars made by local Pat Roberts Pottery. Manager Dominique Swanson recommends the 20 gift bundles of eco-friendly products offered on the website, www.thewaste lessshop.com.

Find gifts made by artisans and local busi nesses at Tanner’s Magic of Santa Arts and Craft Faire on Saturday, Dec. 3, and Sunday, Dec. 4, at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. A Reno tradition of 43 years, the fair offers handmade items such as painted snowmen, doll clothes and fine woodwork. Admission for both days is $5 for adults; $4 for seniors and students; and free for children under 16 years. Tell the parking attendant you are attending the faire to receive free parking. Donate a can of food or new socks for a $1 off admission. Admission to the last hour of each day’s show is free. If you can’t make the event, visit www.renocrafters.com for an extensive list of local arts and crafts businesses and artisans.

Make gifts, decorations

Paper or popcorn chains, bright paper stars and cutout Santas are all fun ways to decorate your tree, especially when children are involved.

If you sew, knit or do paper crafts, dream up something wonderful for your family and friends. Instead of buying wrapping paper, wrap gifts in colorful fabric or scarves, or make simple fabric bags that can be reused. Homemade gifts are good alternatives to mass-produced goods and are often plastic-free. Online project instructions

| BY JANICE HOKE

for tree ornaments, gifts and wrapping ideas are available at www.joann.com; click on the Proj ects & Learning tab.

Everybody loves homemade treats like nut breads, cookies, cupcakes, fudge or granola. When you think about wrapping food treats, consider beeswax wraps, available in shops and online, instead of plastic or aluminum wrap.

Laura Johnson of Reno makes cookies for gifts and uses her own beeswax wraps. She shops for beeswax at local farmers’ markets. “Instead of putting cookies in a plastic container or zippered plastic bag, I will wrap them in reusable beeswax cotton cloth squares that I make by hand,” she says. “I melt beeswax in a crock pot in the oven and then paint the melted wax onto the cloth squares until saturated. These all-natural food wraps can be washed with dish soap in lukewarm water and reused for many years.”

Holiday recycling tips

Cleaning up after the holidays generates lots of trash, an 25% increase in volume nationally, said Paul Rosynsky, senior communications specialist for Waste Management for northern Nevada and California.

Plain wrapping paper is recyclable. But if the paper has glitter or other metallic or plastic ingredients such as flocking, it must go in the trash rather than the recycle bin. Plastic bows and ribbons, or anything long and stringy—like gar lands and twine—also wreak havoc in recycling machines, so they go in the trash.

Glass jars are acceptable for recycling, but broken glass and fragile Christmas tree orna ments don’t belong in the recycling bin. “I can’t emphasize enough how critical it is to break down cardboard boxes,” Rosynsky said. If you have more boxes than will fit in the bin, “hold onto them until the next week if possible.” If the bin lid will not close because of overloading, the boxes might get wet, rendering them useless for recycling, he said.

Aluminum cans and big roasting pans can be recycled, but wipe out as much food residue as possible (and bear in mind that bears rummage through trash cans). Rosynsky recommends hosts use reusable dishes and silverware rather than disposables. “Make your special recipe of lasagna in a glass or ceramic dish,” he suggested.

And after the presents are opened and the feast is done, recycle the tree via the Christmas Tree Recycling Program offered by Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful and its partners. Six sites will be open between Dec. 26 and Jan. 10. The service is free, but a $3 donation is suggested.

Donations will be matched by the NV Energy Foundation. Tinsel, flocking and ornaments must be removed. For those who can’t get the tree to the locations, area Boy Scouts offer a pick-up service at Scouts4Trees.com. Most trees will be chipped up into mulch and spread in area parks. Tree lights can be donated at the tree recycling sites, but remove them from the trees yourself.

Sisters Carol and Claire at the Carmel of Reno Monastery. Photo/David Robert

Indigenous ingenuity

Priorities on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation: fighting cancer, reviving agriculture and keeping Native languages alive

Surrounded by mountains capped with pine trees, in a valley known for its picturesque sunsets, the Duck Valley Indian Reservation is a small and “easy flowing community,” residents said.

“Everyone knows everyone by the cars they drive, if you will,” said Antoinette Cavanaugh, who was born there. “There’s no, ‘Hey, can we make a plan to meet up at such-n-such time?’ … People just stop in.”

The town of Owyhee is on the reserva tion, which is home to 1,500 people. The community is 100 miles north of Elko and 100 miles south of Mountain Home, Idaho.

Nevada Humanities recently brought the people of the remote reservation together with other participants in a Zoom pro gram entitled Owyhee: Reclaiming Land, Language, and Community. The event was a part of Nevada Humanities’ “A More Perfect Union” series aimed at connecting the state’s far-flung communities.

The Duck Valley Indian Reservation is home to descendants of both the Western Shoshone and Northern Paiute people, who once roamed freely over the mountains and high deserts of Nevada and Idaho. The reservation occupies a fraction of those tribes’ vast Indigenous home land the people called Newe Sokkobi, the Great Basin. Their reach extended into what are now California, Utah and southeastern Oregon.

The Zoom broadcast began with the pulse of traditional hand drums and the Shoshone “Boat Song” performed by the Sunrise Singers. Words and rhythms from ancient days tumbled out of computer speakers from Reno to Elko.

Cavanaugh began the community conversa tion by describing her ancestors’ ancient ways of conservation. With great understanding and respect for the land, she said, the people would pack up their belongings and move from place to place to allow the land’s resources to replen ish themselves.

In the late 1800s, the tribes’ traditional lands

Tribal members inside a “hoop house,” a greenhouse where vegetables are grown year-round. Photo/Duck Valley Reservation

were reduced to a 289,819-acre reservation. In the United States’ initiative to protect gold sources, a series of treaties were signed that relegated the Western Shoshone and Northern Paiute people to reservations. The formerly nomadic tribes were granted sovereign rights to govern themselves within those boundaries.

No longer able to forage across an expansive landscape, Duck Valley residents turned to agriculture. Many families, including Reginald Primo’s ancestors, became ranchers. Primo is among the third generation in that tradition.

“It was something to hear those stories about what our people had to go through to survive,” Primo said. He recalled a story he heard from his aunt and uncle, who remembered the con ditions in the Great Basin in the 1930s. Before the Owyhee River was dammed, it would dry up, he noted. Crops failed, and tribal members would take to the hills in drought years to find land at higher elevations that provided “perpet ual spring.” They planted gardens in the high country and took turns tending them throughout the summer. In the fall, whole families would gather to harvest the food and carry it back to the valley.

“It was hard work,” Primo said. These stories inspired Primo to re-create hoop houses, a form of gardening that fell out of favor with the advent of grocery stores. Hoop houses, he explained, are “simply a less expensive greenhouse.”

Unlike the controlled environment of green houses, modern hoop houses are a plastic shell, “powered by the sun and earth only.” That, he said, “extends the growing season” and allows families on the reservation to grow and harvest produce from March to November. Primo said that in some years, hoop houses can supply vegetables through December.

Across the reservation, the sturdy plastic sentinels have allowed members to be healthier and gain a sense of fulfillment, he said. “When you grow it yourself,” Primo said, “you have that ownership.”

Preserving ancient tongues

The conversation transitioned from hoop hous es to language preservation as Cavanaugh in troduced Laurie Caskey and Yolanda Manning, who fight to keep their traditional languages alive. Indian boarding schools and forced assimilation were devastating to Indigenous languages, they said, because children were prohibited from speaking their native tongues.

| BY KATELYN WELSH

Across the West, many Indigenous languages were lost.

Shoshone was Caskey’s first language. She teaches it to young people so that it will not become extinct. That’s made easier now that the language can be in written form. Shoshone had been an exclusively oral language until an thropological linguist Wick Miller in the 1970s developed a written orthography with the help of Duck Valley’s Beverly Crum of the Western Shoshone.

“It bothers and hurts me, because we are going to lose it someday,” said Caskey, “and so I keep talking.” She speaks it so much, she is starting to lose her English, she said. “I used to be a good speller and even (won) spelling bees in school.” These days, spelling English words has gotten harder.

She doesn’t mind. Her dedication to pre serving the language leads her to engage with people in the language and speak to whoever will listen. She keeps the ancient words alive.

Manning, whose first language was Paiute, is similarly immersed in her traditional lounge, which she learned from her grandparents. She was told “Eh NEME—NEME YADUANNA,” which means, “You are people, Paiute people! Speak your language!” That’s a phrase she now passes down to her students.

As a part of her teaching regimen, she uses traditional English nursery rhymes with the words translated into Paiute. She explained that children can catch on very quickly to the new language when it comes in the form of a familiar song. For example, she said, “they immediately know (the song) is ‘The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,’” said Manning.

She also uses picture books and games in her lessons. She employs “anything where they are repeating the language over and over again,” she said.

Manning takes a different approach with older kids and teenagers. Instead of learning names and colors, “they want to talk about what is relevant in their lives.”

Preserving the languages is a challenge. The number of native speakers is declining as elders die. There are many others who understand the language, Manning said, but hesitated to speak it due to their experience in boarding schools, or worries that knowing tribal languages may hinder children’s educations in English. That’s shouldn’t be a concern, she said.

“I know that studies have actually proven that people who have more languages, the more intelligent they actually are,” Manning said. “It opens your mind up, and you become better in all your academics by learning different languages.”

Manning hopes to encourage more people to utilize the language by creating a safe place for people to make mistakes and allow them to grow comfortable with their own voices. “We

need to hear it more often in order to feel com fortable with it,” she said.

Natural remedies proven

The new generation of Indigenous descendants also took part in the presentations. Tziavi Melendez, a senior at Owyhee High School and class body president, is a member of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and a descendant of the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe. She talked about “doza,” a traditional tribal remedy.

“Doza, I remember one of my relatives telling me, is so strong that if you put it in the water, it will kill the fish,” she said. Doza or fernleaf biscuitroot, along with elderberry, are native remedies used for millennia. Many people on the reservation turned to traditional medicine during the pandemic.

Melendez wanted to show the efficacy of traditional knowledge through science. Through research at Boise State University, that’s what she did: Melendez demonstrated that doza and elder berry not only kill bacteria; they also destroy lung cancer cells. Her findings won a science fair. She was then invited to an international science fair, competing against 1,000 students worldwide.

“I was super proud of this project, not so much for the recognition and winning, but I was able to prove that traditional medicines work, and that they’re more powerful than we realized,” Melen dez said. She plans to continue her research into

the healing plants as a college student.

Melendez, who is too young to vote, also works to expand native-voter access. She began the first statewide Native American caucus youth council in the run-up to the 2020 pres idential election. “If voting wasn’t important, they wouldn’t be trying to take our voice away,” said Melendez.

She said it’s important that Indigenous people vote in order to influence decisions that impact them and their sovereignty. “Even though there’s not a lot of us (compared) to the amount of people in the country, there are enough of us to make a difference,” she said

Nevada’s native voter turnout in the 2020 election set a record compared to prior years, she noted.

Other Owyhee High School students also shared their efforts to preserve their peoples’ traditions and culture.

“We show that we are not wasting anything in return for (animals) blessing us with its food,” said Lenso Hanchor, who talked about the tribe’s hunting practices.

The evening came full circle when Lilli John son discussed raising hormone-free cattle on pesticide-free grass and cultivating their hoop house. The hoop house gives Johnson and her family more control over what they consume and helps them eat healthy.

“We grow a lot of food, so we have to eat the

vegetables every night,” said Johnson.

Cavanaugh ended the community conver sation by paying tribute to her hometown. She enjoys sharing stories from Duck Valley, she said, because they help dispel stereotypes about Indigenous people.

“It’s home,” she said. “Through so many

challenges of living and building that commu nity, there is a rich sense of resilience, tradition and culture.”

The full conversation is available on video on the Nevada Humanities website.

Laurie Caskey and Yolanda Manning discuss the Paiute language during Owyhee: Reclaiming Land, Language, and Community.

Planets and Bright Stars in Evening Mid-Twilight For December, 2022

December skies

The month brings winter—and an evening planet extravaganza!

All the planets of our solar system (ex cept Earth, our viewing platform) appear in a long lineup across December’s early evening sky.

Mercury and Venus begin the month deep in the sun’s glare; emerging from the far side of the sun, they’ll become visible by mid month from sites with a good view toward the direction of the setting sun, but 30 minutes later. Venus will be possible to see with the unaided eye, and Mercury with binoculars in the same field, as sky darkens a bit.

Watch the moon cozy up to each of the three other naked-eye planets within a 10day span: Saturn in Capricornus on Nov. 28, Jupiter in Pisces on Dec. 1, and Mars in Taurus on Dec. 7. In a rare occultation of the red planet at opposition and at its brightest (magnitude -1.9), the full moon will actually cover and uncover Mars early that evening.

Uranus and Neptune, discovered in 1781 and 1846, respectively, are fainter and require at least binoculars and a finder chart. It’ll be best to search for them when the moon is ab sent, or just a crescent and not close by.

The moon returns to the evening sky to sweep past all seven planets in 11 nights, Dec. 24-Jan. 3.

The December 2022 Sky Calendar, the De cember evening skies constellation map and the Uranus finder chart, available at RenoNR.com, will help you see the events mentioned in this column and find your way around the sky.

At dusk on Dec. 7, the full moon is closely to the upper right of Mars, low in the east-north east, and poised to occult it. Thirty minutes af ter sunset, Mars appears about one degree to the lower left of moon’s center, or three-quarters of a degree from its edge. From Reno, around 6:37 p.m., the moon takes about 30 seconds to “snuff out” Mars, because the planet is not a point

December’s evening sky chart. Illustration/Robert D. Miller

source, but has a sensible disk, at least when viewed with a telescope. Around 7:39 p.m., Mars reappears at the moon’s upper edge.

Using binoculars within 30 minutes after sunset on Dec. 8, try for Mercury 4.8° to the upper left of Venus, very low in the southwest to west-southwest, with the moon rising within 12° to the lower left of Mars in the east-north east. From a place with unobstructed views in the critical directions—no high mountains— you may be able to spot all six bright members of the lineup, in order from horizon to horizon, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the moon, simultaneously. That’s a 177° span!

After Dec. 8, moon rises later and drops out of the early evening sky for two weeks, while Mercury and Venus get easier to see, as both climb higher nightly.

Those folks who enjoy getting out early can follow the moon in the morning sky. It’s near full, in the west-northwest, to the lower right of Mars on Dec. 7, and to its upper left on Dec. 8; waning gibbous, near the “Twin” stars of Gemini, Pollux and Castor, on Dec. 10 and 11; near Regulus, heart of Leo, on Dec. 14; as a crescent near Spica, on Dec. 18; and finally, as a thin, old, 5 percent crescent low in the southeast with Antares, heart of Scorpius, 5-6° to its lower left, on Dec. 21.

Returning our attention to the evening sky, we find Mercury appearing farthest (5.9°) to the upper left of Venus Dec. 16 and 17; reaching greatest elongation 20° from sun and 5.3° to the upper left of Venus on Dec. 21; and ascending highest in twilight on Dec. 23 and 24.

On Dec. 19, Saturn is midway between Venus and Jupiter, 39° from each.

On Dec. 21 at 1:48 p.m., the sun, in the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer, enters the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, and reaches its southernmost excursion directly over the Tropic of Capricorn in the south Pacific Ocean. This marks the beginning of winter for the Northern Hemisphere. That evening, Jupiter is 90° east of the sun, and is only 1.3° south of the place in the constellation Pisces (called the “first point of Aries”), where the sun will appear at the start of spring.

On Dec. 24, the moon returns to the evening sky as a crescent, in a pretty gathering with Mercury and Venus. That day, note sun’s loca tion in southwest to west-southwest, 38 minutes before sunset. On Dec. 24, Venus follows sun’s path, 68 minutes later. You can also find Venus 8° to the lower right of the 4 percent crescent moon. Binoculars will show Mercury 5° to the right of the moon and 4° to Venus’ upper left At dusk on Dec. 25, the 10 percent crescent

| BY ROBERT VICTOR

will be in the southwest, with Venus 21° to its lower right; Mercury 3.5° to Venus’ upper left; and Saturn 12° to moon’s upper left.

On Dec. 26, the 19 percent crescent will appear within 6° to the left of Saturn. The moon is midway between Venus and Jupiter, 35° from each. Mercury is 2.8° to the upper left of Venus.

On Dec. 27 at dusk, the 29 percent crescent moon will be high in the south-southwest, with Saturn and Venus respectively 19° and 48° to its lower right, and Jupiter 21° to the moon’s upper left. Mercury will be just 2° above Venus. Mars will be in eastern sky, 90° east of the moon.

Mercury passes within 1.5° north (to the upper right) of Venus on Dec. 28, and will fade sharply and drop lower in twilight in month’s closing days. The moon this evening is a fat crescent, 39 percent full, and 7° to the lower right of Jupiter. Watch Saturn creep along in its 30-year circuit around the zodiac: Tonight, Saturn passes 1.3° north of 3.7-magnitude star Gamma in Capricornus, and will pass 1.4° north of 2.9-magnitude Delta Cap, end of the Sea-goat’s tail, on Jan. 14. Before then, Saturn will form an isosceles triangle with the two stars, 1.6° from each, on Jan. 6.

At dusk on Dec. 29, the moon is at first quar ter phase, half full, and is located 90 degrees or one-quarter of a circle east of the sun. Jupiter is 7-8° to the west, or right, of the moon at dusk. Mercury is 1.7° to the right of Venus and slightly higher. On Dec. 29 and 30, the moon and seven planets—in order of their positions in the sky from west to east, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Neptune, Jupiter, the moon, Uranus and Mars—reach their minimum span during this apparition, 135°.

On Dec. 30, the gibbous moon, 61 percent full, is 21° to the upper left of Jupiter. Mercury, fading rapidly as it faces more of its dark side toward us, is within 2.9° to the lower right of Venus.

At dusk on New Year’s Eve, the 71 percent moon has nearly reached the halfway point of the 68° gap between Jupiter and Mars. Bid farewell to Mercury, 4.4° to the lower right of Venus. Sirius, the “Dog Star,” reaches its high point in the south in the middle of the night, halfway in time between sunset on New Year’s Eve and sunrise on New Year’s Day. Check out Robert Frost’s short poem, “Canis Major,” for an enjoyable description of the canine’s trek from east to west across the southern night sky.

For $12 per year, Sky Calendar subscribers receive quarterly mailings, each with three monthly issues. For info and a sample, visit www.abramsplanetarium.org/skycalendar.

Robert Victor originated the Abrams Planetari um monthly Sky Calendar in October 1968, and still produces issues occasionally, including the December 2022 edition. He enjoys being outdoors sharing the wonders of the night sky.

For the birds

With snowshoes and at least 4-5 hours of daylight, Chickadee Ridge makes for a delightful winter journey

There are plenty reasons to get outside during the holiday season. Maybe you want to give your kids a little exercise while they’re home on break. Perhaps you’d like to exercise yourself to balance out all the delicious foods that add to the festivity of this season. Or maybe you just want to find reasons to appreciate the fine weather and good snow we have around Reno. Whatev

er your reason, one local gem you don’t want to miss out on is snowshoeing to Chickadee Ridge.

If you’ve never heard of Chickadee Ridge, or if you’ve heard of it but never been, it’s a real treat. On a series of rocky outcroppings over looking Lake Tahoe, near Mount Rose Meadows, there are flocks of wild mountain chickadees that create a magical experience. These small birds

It’s only during the winter months of food scarcity that chickadees become more bold and inquisitive. Photo/Maggie Nichols

are year-round residents of Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada. They spend all summer and fall caching seeds for the winter (and exclaiming “cheese burger,” as many Tahoe-raised children will tell you) and can be easily observed flitting between trees on sunny days.

Chickadee Ridge is an awe-inspiring place not only for its view of the lake, but also because of the birds after which it’s named. Hundreds of chickadees spend their winters around this sunny patch on a forested slope that’s a relatively short snowshoe journey from the highway. To find this unmarked ridge, drive out of Reno heading up Mt. Rose Highway toward Lake Tahoe. Not long after crossing over the summit, Mount Rose Meadow opens up on both sides of the highway. Expanded shoulders allow for cars to park along the side of the road.

Chickadee Ridge can be found by jour neying through the trees along the southwest edge of the meadow. During the winter, no marked trails or posted trail signs will point or take you to exactly the right spot; it’s a bit of a way-finding expedition. With a pair of snowshoes strapped to your feet, and a map and compass in your hands, Chickadee Ridge is roughly a mile from Mt. Rose Highway, south-southwest through the woods. Despite the lack of signs to guide you, you’ll know you’ve made it when you pop out of the woods to areas of exposed granite and clusters of rocks overlooking Tahoe. Take a rest in the open area—and after a few minutes of silence among the rocks, the resident chickadees will start to show themselves.

With this many chickadees living along such an easy-to-reach sunny ridge, at some point, people started feeding them. But before you start sharing your lunch with these small birds, local biologists agree that feeding them human

| BY MAGGIE NICHOLS

foods (like bread or chips) is detrimental to their health. Offering them foods they could find in their local environment is far better for them; this means bringing specialty items like pine nuts or (unsalted) sunflower seeds. Toting a small amount of a birdseed mix designed for an outdoor bird feeder is a reasonably healthy way to interact with these small birds, too.

If you do decide to bring some chickadee health food with you on your outing, remem ber to put the well-being of the birds first. Spread seeds across a nearby rock, and watch them gather while you take photos. Some of them may land on your hand, held flat offering seeds. Their striking markings and quick movements make chickadees marvelous photo subjects. Whether you take appropriate bird food or just watch and appreciate their aerial ballet, spending time with these wild inhabi tants of Chickadee Ridge is a unique way to connect with Tahoe’s natural beauty.

Visiting the avian residents of Chickadee Ridge is a specific wintertime pleasure. During the warmer seasons, mountain chickadees are unlikely to venture so close to humans visiting the ridge. It’s only during the winter months of food scarcity that they become more bold and inquisitive. This makes Chickadee Ridge a great day trip over the holidays or on sunny winter mornings.

Reaching the trailless ridge requires snowshoes, wayfinding skills and 4-5 hours of daylight. Even when snow levels seem low at lake level, the snow is much deeper at the elevation of Mt. Rose Meadows and Chickadee Ridge, and it takes longer to melt from shaded groves. You can buy or rent a pair of snow shoes to make the trek; again, be sure to give yourself plenty of daylight to accomplish this bird-seeking mission. A mile of hiking in the summer typically takes less than a half-hour, but a mile of snowshoeing can take well more than an hour.

If you’re properly prepared for this 2-3 mile round trip journey, there’s no doubt you’ll enjoy your foray to see the iconic mountain chickadees in their natural habitat!

a descendant of George Donner, connected with his family’s history at age 11, when he read a book about the Donner Party’s 2,000mile walk across the continent and entrapment in the Sierra Nevada during the terrible winter of 1846-47.

“As a kid, the Donner story was a part of family folklore, but it wasn’t until I read Ordeal by Hunger (by George R. Stewart) that I found out the details,” said Ahlrichs, who lives in Indianapolis. “I was gripped by it. It was about kids my age, crossing the plains and deserts, and getting trapped on a mountaintop. I saw it as an adventure story. There was double excitement, because they were my ancestors.”

Aldrich’s fascination with the doomed emigrants continued into adulthood. He read more books, dug into historical research and visited the pioneers’ campsites at and near Donner Lake, 36 miles west of Reno. When he was a boy, his thoughts often returned to the plight of those pioneers on Christmas, when the starving families huddled in makeshift shelters as a series of storms hammered the Sierra Nevada.

“Our family had German-Lutheran traditions and rituals on the holiday; we’d light candles and read the accounts of Christ’s birth in the Bible,” he said. “We were comfortable, cared for and well-fed. I understood how fortunate I was compared with what the Donner families had gone through.”

Amid the suffering, there was a ray of hope: One of the mothers had squirreled away morsels of food to provide her four children with a “feast” on Christmas Day.

“That’s a very powerful part of the story,” Ahlrichs said. “It stuck with me when I read it. I could feel the excitement of the children

as they watched the pot boil and realized that they would be eating real food again. The contrast of that simple thing bringing them joy and what they had suffered through really resonates.

“It makes me think how fortunate we are, and how people can find hope in what seems a hopeless situation. … It’s not your usual Christmas story.”

the Sierra, and arrived at what is now Donner Lake on Oct. 31. The emigrants several times attempted to cross the high pass, but couldn’t make headway through the deep snow. The 81 members of the party, including 41 children, were entrapped in the Sierra. A series of storms pinned them in place for months.

altitude of 5,936 feet above sea level. The George and Jacob Donner families, delayed by a wagon accident, were crowded in tents and lean-tos 6 miles east of the lake, at Alder Creek camp.

The Donner Party’s journey began with laughter and hope in the spring of 1846.

The two Donner families and the Reed family, the nucleus of the Donner Party, crossed the Missouri River in May 1846 and aimed their nine covered wagons west, toward the promised land of California. They expected a five-month, 2,000mile walk across the continent—but they took an unproven shortcut through what is now Utah and Nevada that added 150 miles and weeks of travel.

The vanguard of the party arrived at the future site of Reno during the last week of October to see snow blanketing

Their remaining oxen were buried, standing, in the snow. They probed the drifts, but the deceased cattle were lost until spring. They had already scraped the bottoms of barrels and soon ate their dogs, cracked the bones of previous meals to suck out the marrow, and boiled leather for hours to make a gluey broth that was nearly impossible to swallow. Famine stalked the camps.

Most of the pioneers stayed in three makeshift cabins near Donner Lake at an

On Dec. 16, five women and 10 men on snowshoes left the high camps in an attempt to reach the American settlements they thought were 40 miles to the west. By Christmas Eve, eight days later, the 15 snowshoers, later dubbed the “Forlorn Hope,” had faced one calamity after another.

Their guide, Charles Stanton, 35, went snow blind and was left behind on Dec. 21. Two days later, another storm caught the group in the open. The freezing escape party hurriedly made camp. On Christmas Eve, the surviving members of the Forlorn Hope drew lots to determine who would be killed to provide meat for the others. No one had the heart to carry out the death sentence on the loser. That night,

Robert Lebron's painting "Trek of Forlorn Hope." Photo by Frank X. Mullen

Above: A photo illustration of a Discovery Channel re-enactment at the high camps in 2004. Photo by Frank X. Mullen; illustration by Dennis Wodzisz

Antonio, a 23-year-old Mexican herder, was dying. Patrick Dolan, 35, had gone mad as a result of hyperthermia. He shed his clothes and cavorted in the snow, claiming to be too warm. Franklin Ward Graves, 57, who made the snowshoes back at the lake, was frostbitten, starving and failing.

By Christmas morning, Antonio, Dolan and Graves were dead. With his last breath, Franklin Graves had begged his daughters, Mary and Sarah, to use his flesh for nourishment. The place where they were stranded was later dubbed the “Camp of Death.”

Two days after that Christmas, the cannibalism that has come to define the Donner Party began at the starved camp. They ate the forbidden food. They wept. Around the campfire, no one could meet the eyes of another.

What was left of the snowshoe party resumed its march westward when the storms abated. The group became lost in the maze of canyons along the North Fork of the American River. More of them died before reaching the California settlements weeks later.

stones and could barely rise from the moldy quilts on the cabin floor.

His older sons left the cabin to collect firewood. On Dec. 25, Breen wrote: “Offered our prayers to God this Christmas morning.”

The future looked bleak: “The prospect is appalling but (we) hope in God Amen,” he wrote.

The others left behind in the high camps also suffered, prayed and waited. Several in the high camps had already died. The rest were emaciated and weak. Snow hugged the pine branches and covered the entrances to their shelters. “No living thing without wings can get about,” Breen wrote.

About 100 yards from Breens’ shanty, the cabin of the Murphy family was built around a boulder left on the mountain thousands of years before by a creeping glacier. Their family’s hearth was against the large rock, which served as one of the cabin’s four walls. The Murphys had a fire, but little else.

“Christmas we had a meal of boiled bones and oxtail soup,” recalled Mary Murphy, who was 14 at the time of the ordeal. “After supper mother was barely able to put the babies to bed, and later on that evening, with brother William reading her favorite psalm from the Good Book, she became bedridden and seriously ill.”

swaddled in damp wool blankets and covered in quilts or stinking buffalo robes. They barely stirred.

At Alder Creek, the holiday passed as any other day of misery.

matter: There was hot food in the kettle. It was a Christmas to remember.

“Children, eat slowly,” Margaret Reed told them, “for this one day you can have all you wish.”

After midnight, the storm abated, and the sky cleared to reveal a crescent moon whose rays glittered like gems atop a blanket of snow that Patrick Breen estimated to be more than 7 feet deep. The snow level at the pass was estimated to be double that depth.

But in the Reed family’s half of the Graves cabin, whose site is now beneath Interstate 80, Christmas was marked with an unexpected celebration. Margaret Reed, 32— whose husband, James, 45, had been banished from the group in October—had planned a surprise for her four children.

“My mother had determined weeks before that her children should have a treat on this one day,” survivor Virginia Reed, then 13, remembered later. “She had laid away a few dried apples, some beans, a bit of tripe and a small piece of bacon.”

On Christmas morning, Virginia; Patty, 9; and their brothers, James Jr., 5; and Thomas, 3, had ox hide “soup” for breakfast. The brown water hardly dented their hunger.

This year, 2022, Donner Pass accumulated more than three feet of snow by Nov. 18, according to the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory. The pass averages about 34 feet of snowfall annually. But the visitor’s center at Donner Lake remains open in winter.

“We do get heavy visitation on winter weekends,” said Jeremy Lin, a park interpreter at Donner Memorial State Park. “We’re open every day and have become kind of a little hub, because we’re open and functioning in snowstorms when other businesses are closed down because of the weather.”

huddled around a fire that was sinking in the deep snow, their companions at the lake also suffered.

In the Breen cabin, whose site now is beneath the Pioneer Monument at Donner Memorial State Park, Patrick and Margaret Breen and their seven children spent the holiday in misery.

“Rained all night and still continues to rain,” Patrick Breen, 51, wrote in his diary on Christmas Eve. He estimated the snow to be about 7 feet deep. “Poor prospect for any kind of comfort,” he wrote. “… May God help us to spend the Christmas as we ought considering circumstances.”

More snow arrived around noon on Dec. 24 and fell throughout Christmas Day, according to Breen, who was suffering from kidney

Six miles west of the lake at Alder Creek, the two Donner families and several others didn’t have time to build cabins before the storms began their march—and they were in even worse shape than their comrades at the lake. The six men, three women and 12 children at Alder Creek had been living on thin soup, made from animal bones boiled over and over. They also choked down the glue that formed on iron pots after they boiled strips of leather. The few people who could still move about occasionally ventured outside their tents to brush accumulating snow off the canvas so that the flimsy shelters weren’t crushed.

George Donner, the party’s leader, was suffering from gangrene. His brother, Jacob, overcome with despair, had died wrapped in blankets. The Donner children—including Frances, 6; Eliza, 3; and Georgia, 4—were

“Christmas Eve came, no stockings to hang, no Santa Claus to come down our chimney in that cold starving camp. No Papa to come home to his children,” Patty Reid later wrote. “Christmas morning came and our breakfast was a pot of glue, it was stewed ox hide, but we were pleased to have even that to eat. But as soon as we had gone through this … our mother’s face began to brighten … she had a surprise awaiting us.”

Virginia remembered that “the delight of the little ones knew no bounds. The cooking was watched carefully.”

In December, the park offers snowshoe tours on a loop trail which includes the Murphy cabin site at the big rock. “We also go into the campground a bit, where we have the fresh, untrammeled snow. It’s real light and fluffy; it gives people the feeling of what it was like 176 years ago,” Lin said.

Snowshoers can trek through the Jeffrey pines and quaking aspens and feel the cold nipping at their ears and noses.

Patty Reed, who was 9 in 1846

To the children’s eyes, the scraps of food looked as appetizing as a sumptuous meal in a fine restaurant. “It was simply grand!” Patty wrote. The Reeds shared the banquet with the Graves family.

The children’s faces were illuminated by the flickering light of a blazing pine stick as the blizzard howled outside the tiny cabin. The wind whistled through gaps in the log walls. The roof, covered in animal hides, dripped near-freezing water on their heads. But no

“Once you get away from the Visitors’ Center, and you are out in the forest, it’s easy to envision what they faced in the wilderness,” Lin said. “Three minutes out on the loop trail is a landscape of trees and snow and streams. You can kind of picture yourself back in 1847, when this land was wilderness.”

He also tells the story of Christmas at the camps, a tale that evokes visitors’ emotions.

“People have a very visceral reaction to the story,” he said. “It brings the starvation down to a particular moment and a single family. It punctuates how terrible the conditions were. When children were excited to have those meager scraps as a treat, you realize how desperate things were here. … Everyone today overeats on holidays, but knowing what they

“ Christmas morning came and our breakfast was a pot of glue, it was stewed ox hide, but we were pleased to have even that to eat. But as soon as we had gone through this … our mother’s face began to brighten … she had a surprise awaiting us. ”

—

Portrait of Martha “Patty” Reid Lewis. Photo taken at the time of her marriage to Frank Lewis, 1856. Photo/National Archives

went through makes us more grateful for what we have now.”

On Jan. 18, 1847, the seven survivors of the Forlorn Hope group reached the California settlements. The first rescue party made it to the high camps in late February. The last survivor was taken off the mountain in mid-April. In those final weeks of the ordeal, some of the survivors at the high camps also choose cannibalism as a desperate, last resort.

Said Ahlrichs, George Donner’s descendant: “Going through that ordeal changed those kids’ lives forever. They carried that experience with them for the rest of their days.”

“

The Pioneer Monument was dedicated in 1918, with Patty Reed, and sisters Frances Donner Wilder and Eliza Donner Houghton as honored guests.

Of the 81 souls trapped in the mountains, 36 died, and 45 survived. Most of the men died; most of the women and school-age children lived. For those who survived, the long ordeal—and that Christmas Day—was never far from their minds.

“So bitter was the misery relieved this one bright day, that I have never since sat down to a Christmas dinner without my thoughts going back to Donner Lake,” Virginia Reed wrote in Across the Plains With the Donner Party, a memoir penned 30 years later.

Photos of the ceremony show the elderly trio in front of the statue’s 22-foot high stone pedestal, a height thought to be the maximum depth of snow at the lake that winter.

(The Christmas story) brings the starvation down to a particular moment and a single family. It punctuates how terrible the conditions were. When children were excited to have those meager scraps as a treat, you realize how desperate things were here. … Everyone today overeats on holidays, but knowing what they went through makes us more grateful for what we have now.

The women are dressed in black, flanked by the governors of California and Nevada, but there’s a detail that the camera could not show: Frances Donner Wilder, 78, who was 6 at the time of the entrapment, had crackers and peppermint candies in her dress pocket. She always kept such morsels on her person since reaching safety at Sutter’s Fort in 1847.

”

Frances was determined that for the rest of her life, she would never go hungry again.

continued from Page 15

— Jeremy Lin, Donner Memorial State Park interpreter

From left: Nevada Gov. Emmet Boyle, Martha “Patty” Reed Lewis, Eliza Donner Houghton, Frances Donner Wilde and California Gov. Stevens at the dedication of the Pioneer Monument at what is now Donner Memorial State Park on June 6, 1918. Photo/The Donner Party Chronicles

Local lit

New books from Nevada authors are here—just in time for the holidays

Nevada’s rolling mountains and desert vistas have been the setting for countless novels, nonfiction books and short-story collections. This year, the state’s authors have added a long addendum to the state’s bibliography.

They’ve been busy turning out novels, mem oirs and short-story collections which rolled off the presses just in time to be wrapped up and placed under Christmas trees. Whether the ob ject of your literary gift-giving is an outdoors

enthusiast, a pet lover or a city slicker, local scribblers have them covered.

Here’s a look at some new books penned by Nevada authors this year, including several that are set in the Silver State. (Some of the lan

| BY FRANK X. MULLEN

guage here comes from the books’ publishers.)

Outback Nevada: True Stories From the Silver State by John M. Glionna (University of Nevada Press, $27.95): Join author John M. Glionna on a journey to discover the “real Nevada,” a place inhabited by diverse, spirited and sometimes quirky people who make up the fabric of the Silver State. Outback Nevada explores the far-flung corners of the seventh-largest state and introduces readers to the humanity, courage, strength and charm of these little-known Americans. Each story is part of the vast collection of published articles Glionna has written during his decades of work as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and the Las Vegas Review-Journal

This Here Is Devil’s Work: A Novel by Curtis Bradley Vickers (University of Nevada Press, $28.95): In this unflinching, dramatic adventure, modern-day wildland firefighters and cattle rustlers struggle for survival in a changing Western landscape. Braiding together the stories of two firefighters, Morgan and Jeremy, and an abrasive laundromat custodian-turned-cat tle-rustling grandmother, Jacklynn, This Here Is Devil’s Work is a fiery ride through the small towns of Nevada and Montana, and the rugged expanse that connects them.

Carson City Century by Stephen H. Provost (Century Cities/Dragon Crown, $19.95): A former editor, reporter and colum nist with more than 30 years of experience at daily newspapers, Stephen H. Provost is the author of more than 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, including 10 books in his Century Cities series and three more in his America’s Historic Highways series. Carson Century City is a short history of Nevada’s capital, home to the inventor of the Ferris wheel and (for a while) Mark Twain, and site of the state’s first heavyweight championship fight.

Close to the Land: Tales of Smith Valley, Nevada by Joyce Rowntree Phillips (inde pendently published, $15.99): Reno author Phillips delivers tales filled with pitfalls, adventures and pure Western ingenuity. Based on her experiences and those of various rela tives in Nevada’s Smith Valley, the book offers stories about farming, sheepherding, hunting, early aviation, general mischief-making and even a rooster chase. The storytellers—often children and young adults—recall their early lives. The theme of each story varies as char acters face difficulties, including the Spanish flu, freezing weather, hunger, a flood and the dilemma of early aviators aiming for an unlit landing strip. Nevada Assemblywoman Robin Titus said: “From the first story to the last, this book will warm your heart.”

Going It Alone: Ramblings

and Reflections

From the Trail by Tim Hauserman (University of Nevada Press, $19.95): Tim Hauser man takes solo journeys throughout the Sierra Nevada, and through his writing, he shares his

experiences hiking by himself through some of the most spectacular landscapes in the U.S. Some might describe wilderness as the middle of nowhere or nothingness, but for Hauserman, wilderness is everything. While his love for nature remains undaunted through his experi ences, he also discovers that he has overly high expectations for his capabilities. He eventually realizes his long walks in the mountains are less about hiking and more about learning how he wants to live his life. Although not entirely set in Nevada, the narrative covers a lot of ground that’s very close to home.

Straight Flossin’ and Other Stories of the American West by Danny Nielsen (Whistling Rabbit Press, $14.95: Nielsen’s short-story collection is a desert odyssey, mixing stories of the open road, bird counts, rat research, close calls with fires and skunks, and those looking for the American Dream—or what’s left of it.

Straight Flossin’ is funny, rueful and obser vant, with an eye for the absurd.

Dark Ride Deception by Mark S. Bacon (Archer and Clark Publishing, $14.99): In the fourth novel of his Nostalgia City mystery series, Reno novelist Mark S. Bacon sends protagonists Lyle Deming and Kate Sorensen off to solve a murder, find a missing person, and protect the future of their employer. Both work for Nostalgia City, a desert theme park that re-creates an entire small town from the 1970s. Bacon’s first book, Death in Nostalgia City, was recommended for book clubs by the American Library Association. His idea for Nostalgia City came in part from a job early in his career as copywriter for Knott’s Berry Farm.

Get Me Out Of Here! Reflections of PD the Put-Upon Pug by PD the Pug (as told to Marilee Joyce) (Mascot Books, $16.95): PD the Pug is the descendent of a breed that once was the companion of Chinese royalty, yet somehow, the noble hound found him self living with a TV broadcaster. PD leads a privileged life, but is convinced that happiness lies outside! Nevadan Marilee Joyce, the CEO of Joyce Communications, gets inside the head of her pensive pup in a way that dog lovers and their kids can relate to. The book, a rapid-fire romp of lighthearted observations and situa tions that flow from Joyce’s relationship with PD, is the pup’s first literary effort.

48 Hours to Kill by Andrew Bourelle (Penguin/Random House, $27.99): Bourelle, a former Nevada journalist, tells the story of a prison inmate on furlough who learns a terrible secret about his sister’s mysterious death—and descends back into the criminal underworld to uncover the truth. Part of the tale takes place in Carson City and Reno. Author James Patterson says, “48 Hours to Kill is “the best thriller I’ve read all year.”

The Shadows by Bill Brown (independent ly published, $14.99): The Shadows is retired Reno broadcaster Bill Brown’s 10th book. It’s

a collection of short stories in two parts. The first deals with ghost hunting by a television crew and the incredible things that really happened. In the second part, Brown serves up both scary and gentle stories of the paranormal. The nonfiction stories include a conversation with the late Frank Sinatra and a ghostly pre diction of a future murder. Part two is fiction, populated by gentle aliens and vicious spirits.

Helmi’s

Shadow: A Journey of Survival

From Russia to East Asia to the Ameri can West by David Horgan (University of Nevada Press, $28) Helmi’s Shadow tells the sweeping true story of two Russian Jewish refugees, Rachel and her daughter, Helmi. With determination and courage, they survived decades of hardship in the hidden corners of war-torn Asia and then journeyed across the Pacific at the end of the World War II to become U.S. citizens, seeking safe harbor in Reno. This compelling narrative is also a memoir, told lovingly by Helmi’s son, David, of growing up under the wings of these strong women in an unusual American family.

On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World’s Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer by Michael P. Branch (Pegasus Books, $17.99): Reno writer Michael Branch relates a never-before-told story of the ubiquitous horned rabbit—the myths, the hoaxes, the very real scientific breakthrough it inspired—and how it became a cultural touchstone of the American West. Much of the narrative is tongue-in-cheek, but the imaginary rodent/ungulate does have a round-about connection to the development of anti-viral cancer therapies—and is literally helping scientists cure cancer.

| BY JESSICA SANTINA

Holiday malaise

Reno Little Theater’s ‘How to Survive Your Family at Christmas’ proves that home is where the heartache is

It’s an old trope, but a good one: A trip home for the holidays usually serves up heaping amounts of guilt, irritation and memories we’d prefer to leave in the undiscussed past. It underscores how being related to a person doesn’t mean you have anything in common—but also that family is the root of who we are.

Reno Little Theater’s holiday pro duction, How to Survive Your Family at Christmas, is a brand-new comedy that explores the angst of going home for the holidays—where, despite everything, your family loves you anyway.

Director Yassi Jahanmir, an assistant professor of theater at the University of Nevada, Reno, explains that the play, writ ten by William Missouri Downs, is as-yet unpublished and only has been produced a handful of times. Set in 1975, it’s the story of the Nutts, a working-class family in Chicago. Jerry Nutt, the family patriarch (played by Jim Winkler), is the proprietor of the city’s last remaining hat shop.

“He’s maybe not your first choice for a dad,” Winkler says about his character. “He’s had some big, emotional stuff happen and isn’t really able to deal with it … so he doesn’t.

And that manifests in a lot of different ways.”

His wife, Rosy (Claudia Cortez), is Edith Bunker-like in her ditziness and subservience to her husband, though beneath her clueless exterior, she’s surprisingly wise. Their daugh ter, Loretta (B Falk), is the apple who fell very far from her family tree. A Harvard student, Loretta hoped never to return to her blue-collar roots—particularly since her brother’s tragic death years ago—but her new, wealthy boy friend insists on meeting her parents.

“It’s about a family coming together, with their differences and similarities, and find ing forgiveness with each other,” Jahanmir explains. “They’re flawed and dysfunctional in the way every family is, and that will come to a head on Christmas Eve.”

Meanwhile, a trio of carolers forges ahead with a sort of tone-deaf jubilance, introduc ing scene changes and contributing plenty of comedy as they provide all the sound effects for the show.

Assistant director Erich Goldstein says this is not a naturalist play. “It isn’t exactly how things would happen in the real world. The characters are bigger than life,” he says. “And these actors are fantastic. When Yassi says, ‘I want you to try this thing, and it’s a little bit

ridiculous,’ they’re totally on board with it. … they’re really willing to be bigger than life.”

Though the themes of the show are timeless, the fact that it is set in the ’70s cements the nostalgia and make story points more believ able. It has other benefits, too.

“I think it captures some of the essence of American identity,” Jahanmir says. “In a lot of ways, it’s a time that’s similar to now, in the midst of civil rights discussions and a lot of up heaval, and while the play doesn’t directly touch on that, there’s a feeling of disconnect between the generations that is similar to today.”

And like all the best holiday shows, the happy ending and feel-goodness is all baked right in.

“It even snows at the end,” Jahanmir says. “There will definitely be some laughs and maybe some tears.”

Reno Little Theater’s production of How to Survive Your Family at Christmas will be per formed at 7:30 p.m., Thursday through Satur day; and 2 p.m., Sunday, from Dec. 1-18, at 147 E. Pueblo St. Tickets are $28, with discounts. For tickets or more information, call 775-8138900, or visit www.renolittletheater.org.

The cast of How to Survive Your Family at Christmas in rehearsal.

ART OF THE STATE

Craft shopping

of skill sets seemed like a natural match for an entrepreneurial team. They’ve been working together in Reno since 2018, where they own The Virgil, the former church on Vassar Street and Wells Avenue that’s now a coworking space and event venue. They also run Wandering Wyld, a series of pop-up markets in Reno, Truckee and nearby communities for artisans and small producers who peddle items such as soaps, coffee beans, and boutique pet products.

The duo’s newest venture, Wyld Market, is a bricks-and-mortar headquarters where artists and other producers can sell their products on consignment and can rent a booth on a monthly, weekly or daily basis. The market was scheduled to open on Nov. 25.

Learn more at wanderingwyld.com.

Makers Paradise—a makerspace that prioritizes accessibility

Far Out—snow sports gear with grassroots values

Far Out is the new concept store for Coalition Snow, a local ski and snowboard brand that’s operated by and caters to women.

The clothing and merch lines include plenty of “shred the patriarchy” graphics. There’s an offshoot line of products for the boudoir such as CBD Infused Intimacy Oil and Après Delight Massage Candles. And the company makes a point of being socially responsible— its many out-of-store offerings include snow sports travel packages, yoga retreats and an Indigenous Backcountry Scholarship.

Inside the new shop, you’ll find a range of creative clothing and house wares. The website: www.coalitionsnow.com/pages/far-out.

Zawadisha—a Reno market for Kenyan craftswomen

Coalition Snow co-founder Jen Gurecki is also part of the team behind a 10-year-old nonprofit called Zawadisha that provides microloans and other forms of business support to craftswomen in Kenya. They already have an online shop, and their IRL retail location just opened Reno Public Market. The compact space is already stocked with hand-carved wooden spoons, baskets large and small, and a range of other housewares.

Details at shopzawadisha.com.

design

Reno Public Market—the former Shoppers Square, at Virginia Street and Plumb Lane and anchored by CVS and Sprouts Farmers Market, which has been under renovation for the past two years—soft-opened its latest phase in November. A handful of the new tenants are art and design businesses.

Wyld Market—a ‘plugand-play’ art retailer

Jessie Phillips started her career managing farmers’ markets in Santa Cruz, then got into digital marketing for the food and beverage industry. Rachel Macintyre worked in tech for 15 years. When they met, their combination

This Berkeley, Calif.-based makerspace’s soon-to-open Reno branch is a fresh, new, two-story industrial space at the back of the shopping center, across Casazza Drive from the small strip that contains the Alibi Lounge.

One of the Berkeley team’s priorities has been offering studio space and training to veterans and people with disabilities. They plan to keep with that tradition here, too. The venue is working with Reno VA Medical Center to offer art therapy sessions in the new location.

Makers Paradise will also open a separate gallery space inside the shopping center. Find more info at www.makersparadise.org.

Deck the Halls Holiday Pop-Up

Reno Public Market’s art businesses are slated to be fully open by January 2023, along with 16 new food purveyors, a bar and a stage for performances. Meanwhile, the retailers are participating in the Deck the Halls Holiday PopUp event each weekend through Dec. 24. Hours are noon to 7 p.m., Thursday through Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday. The event takes place near the west entrance of the complex, near the CVS drive thru and behind IHOP. The event also features live music, food trucks, photo booths, fire pits, cocktails and appearances by Santa. The website: renopublicmarket.com.

Many of Reno Public Market’s new tenants are focused on art and

Nettie Oliverio, a longtime champion and administrator of Reno arts, is director of arts and culture for Foothill Partners, the developer behind Reno Public Market. Behind her is a new mural by Reno artist Bryce Chisholm. Photo/Kris Vagner

BY BOB GRIMM

Instant Xmas classic

‘Spirited’ soars because Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds throw all they have into the film

We have a new Christmas classic in Spirited, a joyously funny, ambitious musical starring a singing and dancing Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds.

Ferrell and Reynolds throw everything they’ve got into their roles, which require Buddy the Elf and Deadpool to pull off some major-league dance moves along with earnest, endear ing singing. Neither performer is great at dancing or singing, but they are so damn enthusiastic that it’s infectious; there isn’t a single moment when they don’t seem to be giving it 100 percent and having the time of their lives. Their joy translates into very fun viewing.

The film riffs on A Christmas Carol, with Ferrell as Present, a ghost and the executive producer of a reality show where people are, of course, greeted by three ghosts and given the chance to redeem themselves. Present has been in charge for too many seasons and is considering retirement, which would allow him to become human again.

Before retiring, he takes on one more supposedly “unredeemable” person in Clint Briggs (Reynolds), a selfish businessman who makes a lot of money, but goes about it alone. Clint isn’t as despicable as past “Scrooges,” but he’s definitely got some issues that need straightening out. During Clint’s journey through his life, he often switches roles with Present, examining the

ghost’s life and messing with his head. Octavia Spencer plays Clint’s assistant; she’s also a love interest for Present, which successfully takes the movie into the roman tic-comedy realm. Ferrell and Spencer may be this year’s best move couple.

It’s just fun watching these well-known actors hopping into big musical set pieces; a funny number called “Good Afternoon” is the film’s best. Director and co-writer Sean Anders provides some wonderful twists and turns— including one in particular that I did not see coming—that will keep viewers on their toes.

Spirited is one of those movies you will be happy to revisit for years to come, and it finally gives Ferrell the chance to sing his heart in a film. As a fellow Step Brothers fan reminded me, he has been called the songbird of our gen eration, and the songbird has taken merry flight.

Spirited is now streaming on Apple TV+.

A Marvel franchise keeps rollin’ despite the death of its charismatic star, Chadwick Bose man, with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a different kind of movie in the Marvel canon. It’s somber and sometimes slow—but ultimately uplifting.

Director Ryan Coogler puts a lot of the action underwater as Wakanda, and the world, are threatened by an ancient civilization that’s a mix of a creepy Atlantis and Avatar’s Pan dora. The plot has a lot to do with vibranium and trying to keep the potentially dangerous resource out of the hands of countries like the good old USA. (The fictional metal is sort of a stand-in for nuclear weapons.)

Another big aspect of the plot is, of course,

who will become the new Black Panther. On the outside chance that you are the one individ ual among 587,945 people who doesn’t know, I won’t say here, but the choice is not a surprise, and it’s a good one.

The film is at its best when dealing with the creepy underwater army. (Marvel does much better than DC with underwater shenanigans Aquaman sucks.) Some of the action scenes come off as a bit haphazard and hard to follow, especially some of the fight scenes, but the final battle aboard a large seafaring vessel is solid work. It takes a long time getting to that final battle—the film clocks in at 161 min utes—but it’s worth the wait.

There are some nice nods and tributes to Boseman. While his presence is missed, the likes of Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett and Martin Freeman do well in continuing the adventure. Tenoch Huerta is especially good as Namor, leader of the underwater civiliza tion—and a great, conflicted villain. He’s very interesting, and very scary.

This Marvel installment is a little headier, and a little darker, than previous entries. While it’s not one of the better Marvel movies, it does have the distinction of being one of the more unique films, and it works as a standalone movie.

Is it as good as the first Black Panther? In some ways, no. The first film was a lot more fun and rip-roaring right out of the gate—and, of course, it had Boseman at its center. This one is far more meditative, and it gives itself a lot of space to breathe at a deliberate (and sometimes gloomy) pace. It is a good sequel that sufficiently handles some of the problems facing the franchise, and it definitely sets the stage for future fun. To its credit, it is not a

rehash of the first film.

Stay for the credits (of course) for a taste of what will be happening in Wakanda in future chapters. Come on, folks; stop leaving during the credits! It’s a Marvel movie!

Ralph Fiennes delivers some of his best work as an ultra-control-freak chef in The Menu, a caustic, funny stick in the eye to crazed foodies everywhere.

Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) is obsessed with Chef Slowik (Fiennes), so much so that he is willing to spend thousands of dollars to ship himself and date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) to a remote island for an exclusive evening of dining at Chef Slowik’s quietly deranged restaurant.

The couple sits down with a has-been movie star (John Leguizamo), an older married couple (Judith Light and Reed Birney), a fufu food critic (Janet McTeer) and a few others for what is supposed to be the most incredible of culinary journeys.

The courses start out as a seemingly sly joke, with entrées of very little sustenance. As the evening progresses, it becomes clear that Chef Slowik and his staff are not in the best of moods—and they may have a bit of contempt for their demanding clientele. Slow-burning madness ensues.

The film is always good, but it is at its very best when Taylor-Joy and Fiennes are alone onscreen together. They have a meeting in the chef’s office that is one of the tensest, bestacted scenes of 2022. They are an acting match like no other. They will floor you.

Director Mark Mylod, along with writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, deliver biting social commentary with a nice dose of horror.

The film has some memorable villains and heroes; in a depraved way, it makes its villains almost sympathetic. It’s also a good movie for foodies to watch after taking in Hulu’s The Bear, this year’s other great foodie offering.

Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell in Spirited.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes in The Menu.

Rezonomics 101

Star Village Coffee’s goal: Serve great coffee, and support tribal communities

You know the old joke about how eventually there will be a Starbucks on every corner? Luckily, Reno has kept that from happening by fostering a robust local coffee scene.

Star Village Coffee is one of Reno’s newest cafés, opening its doors at 560 Mill St. in early September. Owner Joel Zuniga runs Star Village based the idea of “rezonomics,” a unique model of economic principles and business philosophies that support tribal communities. As proprietor of what is touted as Reno’s first Native American-owned and -operated café, Zuni ga aims to not only serve delicious, caffein ated concoctions, but to give back to the tribal community Star Village represents.

A lifelong Renoite, Zuniga grew up in the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. His pas sion for coffee didn’t start until a decade or so ago when he and his brother took a trip to Costa Rica during the coffee-harvesting season.

“We were able to witness the entire pro cess, and after that, I kind of was hooked there on the ground, watching the process and doing a few tours of some coffee facilities—operations like processing the

coffee, and, of course, the whole harvest side of things,” Zuniga said. “Coming back to the States, I bought a few books, and then I bought a small sample roaster shortly after that and started roasting in my garage as a hobby.”

From there, Zuniga and his family eventu ally opened a roasting facility on tribal land in Verdi and have been roasting coffee for retail locations in the area, through wholesale and online sales. Doing that for the last four years gave Zuniga the means and ambition to open his own coffee shop, expanding the family business and allowing more representation and opportunities for tribal members.

“We try to implement a model that tries to recruit tribal members and, of course, get them interested in all things coffee,” he said. “Then we have our rezonomics model or philosophy. Part of that is circulating some of those dollars back into our underrepresented tribal communities.”

The rezonomics model stresses the impor tance of tribal values like producing and cre ating tangible goods, increasing mobility, and sharing prosperity across generations. Access to production is central to the idea of rezonom ics. More production opportunities allow for higher mobility, which in turn yields higher prosperity. The rewards can then be given back

to the community, including those who are at a disadvantage for whatever reason, be it age, economic status, ability or systemic barriers.

“I want to create an opportunity—especially for younger generations—to encourage that kind of entrepreneurial spirit,” Zuniga said. The idea is if more of these rezonomically-ori ented businesses emerge, it will inspire more to do the same, further contributing to the growth of these historically underserved, and under represented communities.

But Zuniga’s ethos extends beyond just his immediate community. He is conscientious about where and with whom he conducts his business. To obtain his raw product, he sup ports farms owned and run by other Indigenous people—and says a large number of those farms are run by women at various levels. He also works closely with other Native Ameri can-owned businesses in the area, keeping in line with the rezonomics mantra.

On the retail front, Star Village has what it refers to as its “grows wild” menu, with ingre dients that can be sourced locally and readily.

“We try to highlight certain flavor compo nents that are culturally significant. One of those ingredients would be the pine nut; that’s sacred to our people and has sustained us for

thousands of years,” Zuniga said. “When we were deciding on a drink menu, we knew we had to include that, for sure.”

One of Star Village’s most popular drinks is the pine nut latte. Pine-nut harvesting season is in full swing right now, and Star Village sources them locally to make pine-nut milk for their menu items.

“We are just trying to highlight these Indig enous ingredients that are in our backyard that are essential to our people,” he said.

Other ingredients you may find on the menu, depending on the season, include choke cher ries, local chili-infused honey and the yaupon plant. Relatively unknown, yaupon has been used for thousands of years by tribes across the country as a tea and is the only tea in North America with a significant caffeine content.

But Zuniga does recognize the importance of having a menu with more mass appeal, so customers are welcome to come in and order regular coffees, cappuccinos and espressos. According to Zuniga, customers have received Star Village well so far.

“I think Midtown is spreading beyond its usual limits,” he said. “Not long ago, there was nothing here, so you can really see the gentrifi cation happening.”

Though gentrification often carries negative connotations, he didn’t mean this in a bad way. Part of his philosophy is that if businesses are going to spread into new areas, they should be accessible to everyone in the community. Star Village sits on Mill Street in a mostly resi dential area, between Wells Avenue and Lake Street. Its proximity to downtown, Midtown and the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony is sure to attract a diverse patronage.

This may be just the beginning of the next chapter for Zuniga. After the dust settles from this new opening, he hopes to expand the business even more.

“I’d like to eventually turn the production facility into a retail location, and (add) more locations around town after this one,” he said.

It’s the next logical step in the rezonomics model, but Zuniga also possesses a calm, one-thing-at-a-time approach. Right now, he and his brother are content with getting this location established—and sharing their product and wealth with their community.

Star Village Coffee is located at 560 Mill St. For more information, call 775-287-9883, or visit starvillagecoffee.com.

Josh Zuniga, Joel Zuniga and Shae LeClare on the job at Star Village Coffee. Photo/David Robert

BY STEVE NOEL

Winter whites

Some people think red wines are best when it gets chilly. They’re wrong.

When the white snow starts falling and covering our beloved Sierra Mountain ski slopes, most wine drinkers dream of fullbodied red wines. While I love a rich red, let me tell you why you should be serving and drinking white wines all winter long.

White wines are typically viewed as being light, fruity and best on warm summer days. While this may be true about some white wines, there are many that have the richness and body to hold their own on a cold winter’s night.

What do I mean by richness and body? Body in wine refers to how heavy or thick it feels in your mouth. Think about how differently 2 percent milk, whole milk and cream feel when you drink them. Of course, the experience with wine is not as extreme. Wine body is described as being light, medium or full-bodied. Many factors make up the body of a wine, including alcohol levels, grape variety, oak aging, climate, residual sugar and bubbles. Some red wines, like pinot noir, have a light body, while some white wines, like chardonnay,

are full-bodied. A wine’s color alone does not tell us about the body of a wine or what time of year we should drink it.

Here are five tips to help you select a great white wine for winter sipping.

1. If you like it, drink it. Do not let anyone’s rules and thoughts override your taste—especially me. One of my wineeducator friends loves sauvignon blanc in the winter. You do you—but if you want some help finding something new, keep reading.

2. Food is a big part of winter entertaining, so pay attention to parings. Rhone white wines like Marsanne and Roussanne are great served with rich shellfish like shrimp and crab, as well as with many cheese dishes, like fondue. Vegetarian fare can benefit from aromatic white wines like Gewürztraminer or Riesling—do not serve boring wine to your vegetarian family and friends. These wines also work extremely well with spicy foods and strong herbs.

An oaked chardonnay from a warm location has all of the richness, body and flavor it needs to accent the foods of winter. The warm

climate leads to ripe grapes with rich flavors and lots of sugar, providing a higher alcohol content. The oak aging will provide notes of vanilla, toffee, caramel and baking spices. What could be better than to have a glass of wine with all these great flavors with some pumpkin pie or roast turkey?

I spoke with Ty Martin, the owner of Craft Wine and Beer, about his favorite white wines for winter. He reinforced my thoughts: “With all of the crazy food options sure to come my way this year, I will always have a versatile bottle of white on hand. Albarino and Gruner Veltliner are two of my favorites. I particularly enjoy Galicia’s Albarino with fish and pork dishes, but it loves anything salty and pairs surprisingly well with squash.

“Austria’s Gruner Veltliner is a champ at pleasing every palate. It can handle green vegetables with ease, and even stands up to meaty dishes in a pinch. I’m always thirsty for Nanclares Dandelion Albarino, and the leesy Gruner from Christina is an absolute steal.”

I could not agree more, especially about the Gruner. If you have never had a Gruner Veltiner, you owe it to yourself to try one—and if you have never been to Craft Wine and Beer, you need to get down to Midtown Reno to experience a wine shop with some of the most unique and eclectic wines available.

3. Do not serve your winter whites too cold. In the summer, we might want our wines to be as cold as possible, but not in the winter. Most complex white wines will taste much better when served between 45 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing the rich flavors to be expressed by the wine—and enjoyed by you.

4. A sweet wine—like a late harvest, a port or a Sauterne—works wonderfully with heavy cheeses and rich sweet desserts. I do not generally crave these sweet wines, but around the holidays, they can add the perfect magical note to the end of a chilly winter’s night.

5. Sparkling wine always works. What says winter celebration more than Champagne? The fine bubbles in each mouthful of Champagne, Cava, Prosecco, Crémant or Spumante explode and create the perfect environment for light, heavy or sweet foods.

White wines deserve to be served all winter long. Do not limit yourself by being stuck with only red wines. Be original; be bold; and be unique this winter season.

Ty Martin, owner of Craft Wine and Beer: “With all of the crazy food options sure to come my way this year, I will always have a versatile bottle of white on hand.” Photo/ David Robert

| BY MICHAEL MOBERLY

Holiday drinks and me

Our

cocktails scribe has a complicated relationship with the drinks of the season

After many years behind the bar, I have a complicated relationship with holiday cock tails. People have varying expectations re garding their favorite winter holiday drinks, from the sickly sweet to the super strong. We have that green-logoed coffee chain to blame for the ubiquity of particular fall and winter flavors like peppermint and pumpkin spice. Yes, these holiday flavors are a great thing about this time of year—but how do you navigate challenges like nostalgia and food allergies to create delicious holiday drinks at home? To answer these questions, I called upon a few of Reno’s finest barkeeps to help me help you pour some delightful and easy holiday cocktails.

Holiday drinks are all about invoking the feeling of the occasion; historically, we would spice our drinks during the holidays, because spices were rare and used only for special events. Nowadays, we start drinking our holiday beverages the moment the first leaf falls, and with that, we lose some of the cere mony of these flavors and replace them with nostalgia. These feelings of nostalgia drive the cocktail world year-around as we look to drinks that remind us of the joy we felt in carefree moments. That said, the problem with creating beverages that evoke nostalgia,

especially during the holidays, is that everyone has different flavor memories. We hold our flavor memories close, because most flavors use all of our senses, especially in cocktails.

“Holiday cocktails indulge in flavor profiles that are bigger, bolder and decadent,” said Loren DeVincenzi, owner of Rum Sugar Lime.

That moment of, for example, sipping your first boozy eggnog around the fire with your friends—we tie all the feelings from events like that into a little bow and seek them out every time we sip one of our favorite holiday drinks, and that expectation gap can be challenging to overcome.

I recommend working smarter, not harder, to get your loved ones as close to their cherished flavor memories as possible. Using ingredients like store-bought eggnog and cider can be the best way to remind people of the flavors they love. We rarely have from-scratch flavors, and that’s OK, so why not dress up your favorite grocery store eggnog with a perfect blend of spirits to put your spin on a classic? Here’s the recipe for what I call Moberly’s Cheater Nog; this recipe yields 12 6-ounce servings, plus one to enjoy before guests arrive.

64 ounces of store-bought eggnog (I love the Southern Comfort)

The

dairy-free Apres Ski. Photo/Michael

Frey Ranch)

4 ounces of dark rum (recommended: Myers’s)

2 ounces of cognac (cheap, but it must be cognac)

1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon powder

6 star anise pods

Combine all liquid ingredients in a punch bowl and stir. Top with the nutmeg, cinnamon and star anise.

Another challenge we face during this time of year is the sheer volume of dairy and sugar we must navigate. It is hard to get to the New Year without re-evaluating your relationship with dairy; I know I have spent many nights haunted by the ghost of Christmas cream-based cocktails.

“Holiday drinks hit the spot on a crisp, cold winter day, but I’m lactose intolerant,” said Alexis Gillum, bartender at 40 Mile Saloon, in commiseration.

It is hard to find dairy-free or nut-free holiday-drink recipes that only require a few ingredients and a small amount of time, yet we all want to be able to throw together a delicious and fun cocktail that everyone can enjoy.

When I asked Annalisa Suarez, beverage manager at 10 Torr Distilling and Brewing, about holiday drinks, she reminded me of a classic: “I love warm drinks around this time of the year. Something about getting together by a fire, watching the snow fall and drinking green chartreuse and hot chocolate make it feel like the holidays.”

Hot drinks are a perfect way to bring those classic holiday flavors to folks who do not con sume dairy. Drinks like hot toddies, hot cognac ciders and mulled wine are great alternatives to eggnog and buttered rums. These dairyfree alternatives can make your parties more inclusive and help everyone’s tummy in the long run. Here’s what I call my dairy-free Apres Ski recipe; it yields four servings.

4 ounces of green Chartreuse

8 ounces of Monin dark chocolate sauce

24 ounces of creamy oat milk

Heat the oat milk in a saucepan, and stir in the chocolate sauce. Bring to a near simmer, and remove from heat. Stir in Chartreuse; gar nish with a cinnamon stick for stirring.

No matter how complicated the holidays and their drinks may be, I still love them. My greatest joy comes after contemplating the best ways to make my loved ones happy. So cheers to holiday parties, good friends—and better cocktails!

Cover of a cover of a cover

Chest Fever brings The Band’s ‘The Last Waltz’ to Cypress Reno

Cover bands often get a lot of crap for “taking the easy way out” when it comes to performing—but Chest Fever shows that it’s not easy being a tribute act.

Chest Fever, based in San Diego, honors the sounds and legacy of legendary Canadi an/American rockers The Band. While most cover bands settle for a greatest-hits set, Chest Fever goes above and beyond—com plete with costumes! The group is on tour to perform The Last Waltz, the iconic final concert by The Band, which later became a live album and a documentary. Catch a performance of the monumental tribute at 7 p.m., Friday, Dec. 16, at Cypress Reno.

“We first played this concert live under

our original band, named Mrs. Henry, in 2017,” said guitarist Dan Cervantes during a recent phone interview. “Frankly, the idea was sprung up on us from a venue saying, ‘Hey, we heard you guys play The Band really well; have you ever thought about playing Last Waltz?’ And we said, ‘Sure.’ Just like anything else we do as a band, we decided we’re going to go all the way and really put our heart and soul in this.”

The Last Waltz is a lengthy concert. On Thanksgiving night in 1976, The Band took the stage at 9 p.m., and wrapped up the concert up a little after 2 a.m., performing 42 songs in total.

“Our first time, we did three hours; the second time we did it, it was three hours and 45 minutes,” Cervantes said. “Part of the scope is

that there’s so much that went into that concert, and most people know the small version of it, but … with good technology and Spotify, more and more people are getting turned on to the soundtrack. People know that, ‘Wow, it’s four hours of music.’ The decision to take it on the road kind of went natural with the fact that we started taking our performance of music by The Band on the road this summer, where we did a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Rock of Ages.”

Even though Chest Fever has spent a large amount of time studying and performing The Last Waltz, the members say they’re still enjoy ing it.

“I haven’t found the hate relationship of it yet,” said drummer Allan Ritter. “Diving into each one of (the songs), you’re always finding new little intricacies or little nuances that hap pen. You’re like, ‘Oh, we should try that one.’ We were doing ‘Life is a Carnival’ the other day when we were rehearsing, and our keyboard player mentioned to our organ player that he does, like, these little carnival licks, and on one of the breaks, he should do those little carnival licks. It’s fun diving that deep into actually what every single person is doing.”

Added Cervantes: “If you asked my wife, she’s sick of hearing the songs. I agree with Allan; just last night, I was pulling up the concert. I was listening; I was trying to study the vocals. From a musician’s perspective, there’s more than just the elements of how it’s being played. It’s how it’s being sung, how it’s being performed, what’s the tonality, the expression? It can be overwhelming listening to it. I want to do my best to do it in spirit, but there are so many nuances that they did that night that they didn’t do any other night, that are so iconic to The Last Waltz. … They’re striving to play the songs, because they’re not just playing their originals; they’re playing covers that they love, and they’re striving to deliver in a way that’s them, and also give some love back to the original. They do a version of ‘Georgia on My Mind’ (where) you can hear Richard Manuel really diving in on that Ray Charles’s delivery and doing his own. There are a lot of intricacies to dive into, and it doesn’t get old to me.”

The art of performing another band’s live album, especially one with covers, can lead to a few mind-boggling thoughts. Chest Fever, essentially, is performing covers of covers … of covers. Is there still room for the original side of Chest Fever?

“I think we always have our personalities … kind of come out, while still doing service to the music as well,” Ritter said. “… You’re still paying homage to that one, but you’re adding

a little bit of your flair on it as well. We’re not going note for note for note, tone for tone, but we’re getting close to it as we can, with still some of the exploratory-ness that we have naturally.”

Added Cervantes: “I think that it’s hitting the spirit of what they’re doing, and the vibe and delivery is the same message they were trying to deliver. These songs people love and know, so if anything, we’re thinking about: How do we just heighten that experience and not detract? If it’s a super-energetic song like ‘Up on Cripple Creek,’ we’re not going to do the laid-back version. My licks might be a little different than Robbie (Robertson)’s that night, but I’m still going be trying to hear where to put them based on how The Band were playing that night.”

Chest Fever decides which era of The Band to honor based on anniversaries.

“This past August, we did Rock of Ages, because it was the 50th anniversary of that one,” said Ritter. “This one, we’re doing because it’s a holiday concert, but next year, we’re going to be touring the 55th anniversary of Music From Big Pink. There’s also the 45th anniversary of The Last Waltz (movie) next year, so we’re going to be touring The Last Waltz a bunch next year.”

In the sea of tribute acts, Chest Fever brings an extra appreciation for the music and expe rience, as well as the history of a tight band, to their performances.

“When I first saw The Last Waltz, it’d be kind of crazy to know that there was a band out there doing what we’re doing now,” Cervantes said. “I’d be like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ … We are a band, and we are people who have been playing together for about as long as The Band members were playing together. Allan and I have been playing in groups together for 10 years, and we have an original band, so our decision to be The Band that night, and devote ourselves to being everybody else’s Band that night, is a little bit of a different element. It goes into our own love for playing music together, which makes it less of just playing these songs, and playing music together as a band. We found the connection of people actually showing up to the shows knowing our original music and band, and that has been, to us, everything we wanted. We know people want to hear a band do this, and The Band doesn’t exist anymore. It’s good music, and it should be played. … To me, it’s the joy of getting to turn people on to something maybe they’ve never seen, and also give people who’ve always wanted to see it an opportunity to finally see it.”

Chest Fever will perform The Last Waltz at 7 p.m., Friday, Dec. 16, at Cypress Reno, 761 S. Virginia St., in Reno. Tickets are $30 in advance. For tickets or more information, visit www. cypressreno.com.

Chest Fever. Photo/Erica Joan

Band that can jam

Midnight North's Grahame Lesh—performing at Cypress—reflects on recording, touring and family

Being the child of a prominent musician can be daunting. On one hand, you have the fear of comparison if you decide to create music yourself—but on the other hand, you arguably have the best advice and guidance you could possibly get.

Grahame Lesh, son of the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh, embraces these positives, and has made a name for himself with his band Midnight North. The San Francisco-based group has been crafting a folk-rock sound that expands at times into funk jams (“The Sailor and the Sea’’), country tales (“Greene Country”) and blues rock (“Echoes”). The band’s recent album, There’s Always a Story, features the group’s most solid product yet, both in terms of production and songwriting.

Midnight North will perform at the Cy press in Reno on Thursday, Dec. 8.

“We’ve been touring pretty consistently in the last year and a half or so, like everyone else, after taking a break for almost all of 2020 and most of 2021,” Lesh said during a recent phone interview. “We’re back out there. We put an album out called There’s Always a Story about a year ago, so we’re really excited to be still out playing these songs that we’ve finally got out into the world. This show in Reno is going to be one of the last ones of the year for us, and what’s cool for us is to be relatively close to home,

which is San Francisco for some of us, but our bass-player lives in Nevada City.”

COVID-19’s temporary elimination of live shows disrupted the music industry’s usual cycle of writing an album, and then touring behind it. Lesh explained how Midnight North has always done things a bit different.

“We’ve never really tied ourselves to an al bum cycle quite as much,” he said. “We’re kind of just touring whenever we have the time to, and that’s what we’ve been doing the last five, six years. I can definitely see the sort of trends in the industry going more in the direction of what we’ve already been doing, which is trying to build our live audience.”

In May, the band released Selections From Levon Helm Studios, a 10-track live album featuring explosive performances.

“We love being in the studio. We love writing songs, and we love creating new music, but we build our audience more through our live shows, and through our tour,” said Lesh. “I could definitely see the industry going more in that direction, but for us, it won’t be a huge change, because it’s kind of what we’ve been doing.

“It’s just kind of what we’ve always done, even from back when we all had day jobs, and were just touring when we literally could have the time to take off together, just weekends or anything like that,” he said. “We’ve got a routine that works for us. It’s shorter runs; we’re

not out for two months at a time, but we do it a lot, and we’ve sort of found the locations, the places in the country, that really respond to us, so we try to hit those places as much as we can.”

The members of Midnight North are in posi tions now where they can focus solely on music.

“We’re lucky,” said Lesh. “We came out of the scene in the Bay Area, around the music venue Terrapin Crossroads. We would play all the time there, but there would also just be mu sic every night, and it would be some combina tion of us with a bunch of friends playing all the time. That scene opened up a lot of doors for us to pursue our individual music careers, as well as our band’s career.”

I was curious how the diverse San Fran cisco music scene has shaped the Midnight North’s sound—and learned that it can be hard to escape the influence of the Grateful Dead, familial ties aside.

“We’re less of a jam band and more of a songwriter band, but our foundational piece, at least through my experience, has been the Grateful Dead,” Lesh said. “That’s such a Bay Area staple. … The more recent bands that have come out of there that we’ve made friends with … I find them sort of seeping into our sound— The Mother Hips and The Stone Foxes. It’s been cool just to see that the sounds of all of our friends get absorbed, and hopefully the same thing is happening in the other direction, too.

It’s a cool melting pot musically.”

Lesh and the Midnight North have often shared stages with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, and have had many opportunities come their way because of the scene that the Dead cultivated.

“I’m very lucky for the family that I’m a part of, and we are as a band, too, to be a part of the community that was built out of my dad’s music,” Lesh said. “Musically, we make different kinds of music than the Grateful Dead. We get the occasional person who’s expecting to hear us jam more or play more Dead songs, but those are good problems to have. They’re great songs, and sometimes we do play some of them, but we do feel like we write good songs as well, and that they fit together and that we have our own sound. There’s no downside to having the ear of someone like my dad, who we are lucky enough really likes our music and plays with us sometimes.”

There’s Always a Story was the band’s pan demic project, written and recorded throughout the shutdowns.

“(Remote recording) gave us this opportunity, because the album wasn’t done at that point … and everyone sort of came up with stuff in their home studios, or some friends’ studios nearby, and we finished it remotely,” said Lesh. “This was the first time we’d written or completed the writing in the studio, which was really cool for us. Normally, we’ll come together with myself or the other singer, Elliott (Peck), and one of the two of us will sort of bring in songs mostly fully formed, and we’re kind of just teaching the band. This time, the songs were a little less fin ished, so that creative process was in the studio, which was bringing our expertise from our live chemistry. I felt like it really shone through.”

Lesh considers There’s Always a Story to be Midnight North’s best album yet.

“Because we’re not a jam band, but a band that can kind of jam, what we do with all these songs is we build what we call ‘escape valves’ into them that we can take into different direc tions live … and play guitar a little longer, or have a little instrumental break or whatever,” he said. “… At this point, we’ve gotten almost two years of really drilling (the songs), so we’re feeling good about them now, which is awe some. If you ask how it stacks up to the rest of our back catalog, it’s our best album. I feel more and more confident about our songwriting and our performing as we go along and grow. I can say that very confidently.”

Midnight North will perform with Rivvrs at 8:30 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 8, at Cypress Reno, 761 S Virginia St., in Reno. Tickets are $12 in advance, or $15 at the door. For more information, visit cypressreno.com.

Midnight North.

THE LUCKY 13

Breck Lee Durham

Solo artist and guitarist/ vocalist of Trouble Show

Breck Lee Durham has long been a part of the Reno music scene, pushing out a sound that’s rockin’, rippin’ and filled with Americana lyrics. Whether you know his folky solo work, or his electric full band Trouble Show, you know Durham’s got something unique! For more info, visit breckleemusic.com.

What was the first concert you attended? Merle Haggard, Carlsbad Convention Center, Carlsbad, N.M., 1983, with my mom.

What was the first album you owned? Elvis Presley, Elvis Now, 1972, RCA.

What bands are you listening to right now? The new The White Buffalo and the new Lyrics Born. It’s fall slipping into winter, so Mark Lanegan is in the mix.

What artist, genre or musical trend does everyone love, but you don’t get? Pretty much radio hits of all genres. It’s always kinda been that way for me. If it’s contrived/manufactured to be a hit, it’s not going to hit with me.

What musical act, current or defunct, would you most like to see perform live? Tom Waits.

What’s your favorite musical guilty pleasure? Currently, I’m going to go with “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. It changes week to week.

What’s your favorite music venue? The Cellar is really nailing it. It has the old-school rock-joint vibe, but the sound system is dialed in tight. Dennis (McDon ald) did a great job on it. I also really dig the Cypress, too.

What’s the one song lyric you can’t get out of your head? This week, “Fine, f&$k it, forget it” from “Heart Attack” by The White Buffalo

What band or artist changed your life? How? Jack Logan. Back in the early ’90s, I read a Rolling Stone review of this album, Bulk. It was put out by Jack Logan, a wash ing-machine repairman from Athens, Ga., who hung out with Vic Chesnutt and Peter Buck. He’d been recording demos in his living room for years, and then Twin/

Tone Records put out a double disc from years of his recordings. It had some great tunes on it, but the biggest thing it did for me was it made me realize I could just do it myself, and it’s never too late.

You have one question to ask one musician. What’s the question, and who are you asking? “Want to write something together?” to John Hiatt.

What song would you like played at your funeral?

“To Live Is to Fly,” Townes Van Zandt.

Figurative gun to your head, what is your favorite album of all time?

Damn. Might as well ask me to write out a physics equation to launch a rocket. OK, let’s go with Superunknown by Sound garden. Ask me next week for a different answer.

What song should everyone listen to right now?

“Split the Difference” by Trouble Show. (SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION!)

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MINUTES

A home for vets’ families

Sylvia DuBeau

The Veterans Guest House was estab lished in the early 1990s when Chuck Fulkerson and Dick Rhyno, two Reno veterans, noticed some veterans and their families were sleeping in their cars outside of the Veterans Administration Medical Center. One example: A mom from Bishop, Calif., spent the night with her kids in an automobile while her husband was receiving treatment in the hospital’s intensive care unit. She didn’t have money to stay in a motel and didn’t know anyone local who could help with lodging. Today, the home, at 880 Locust St., serves thousands of guests in a nor mal year. Sylvia DuBeau, a Navy veteran, is the Veterans Guest House CEO; she uses her 10 years of nonprofit leadership experience to assist military personnel, veterans and their families. Learn more at www.veteransguesthouse.org.

How did you get your position at the Guest House?

I was in the Navy, stationed in San Diego, and heard about the position up in Reno through a friend of a friend. I’d never been to Reno before. I flew up and inter viewed, and fell in love with the Guest House and the Reno community. I was offered the job, and I took a leap of faith, and here I am, two years later.

What is the Veterans Guest House about? The Guest House is about promoting the health and well-being of veterans and their families. We do this by offering free overnight lodging, transportation and help with basic needs. We also have a kitchen and dining room with a free continental breakfast each morning, and provide a prepared dinner each evening. We also have a pantry with snacks. We’re just like Mom’s house; we have every thing to take care of our guests.

How do you get the word out?

We have a lot of events. We work closely with all the medical facilities in town. We rely a lot on word of mouth, and we’re happy to come and talk to any group. We have some limited forms of advertising, but letting people know that we are here to help them is our most difficult challenge.

How is the Guest House funded?

We are 100% philanthropically fund ed. We’re proud to say that we do not

receive any government funding. It’s the Reno community that enables us to do the things we do. We have an annual Ra diothon to raise funds. We have a fashion show every other year. We also have a raffle; it’s Army versus Navy in a rival raffle. We’re currently selling tickets. With a $25 ticket, participants support soldiers and their families while having a chance to win $5,000. There’s a second prize of $2,500, and five chances to win $500. On Saturday, Dec. 10, during the Veterans Guest House’s annual Army-Na vy football party, the winning tickets will be drawn at halftime. You need not be present to win. (Tickets can be purchased at veteransguesthouse.org/rival-raffle).

What do you see for the future of the Guest House?

I think that we’re entering what a lot of people are projecting as a very difficult economic time. What we are seeing with rising gas prices is that when things cost more, people go without the care they need. We’re seeing guests with more complex needs and greater needs overall, and that means we have to be here and be ready for them, and be ready to do more for the vets than we’ve done in the past.