Regions of Nevada

Three quarters of Nevada lives in one valley that gets four inches of rain a year, ringed by mountains that get thirty. The Spring Mountains stand 12,000 feet over the Strip and turn a July monsoon thunderstorm into a wash running full through a city built on the alluvial fan below — and the same range holds snow at Lee Canyon into April, forty-five minutes from a casino floor at 105 degrees.

Reno sits in the rain shadow of the highest stretch of the Sierra Nevada, and everything about its weather is that wall — seven inches of precipitation a year on the valley floor, forty feet of snow at the crest thirty miles west, and a west wind off it in the afternoon that Nevadans have called the Washoe zephyr for a hundred and fifty years. When an atmospheric river comes in warm enough to rain on that snowpack, the Truckee runs through downtown.