Lake Lahontan State Park is located a few miles south of downtown and offers Camping, Boating, Fishing and just plain relaxing.
Carson River Ranches Campground offers peaceful camping on the banks of the Carson River.
Have an ATV or 4 Wheel vehicles you don't mind abusing? This site is for you!
Fort Churchill State Park, about 8 miles south of town is a historical site that offers Camping by the Carson River beneath the Cottonwood trees.
When he walks on the parade ground at this forgotten military post from the 1860s, Nevada parks ranger Eric Johnson can hear the bugles blow. There are no Indian uprisings to worry about these days, but little else has changed in the past 130 years at the state park 40 miles east of Carson City. Like during the U.S. cavalry days, the only sound is that of the wind blowing through the sagebrush
"I often imagine myself as a soldier," Johnson said. "It's not very hard to do. All there is here is silence."
Life was not pleasant for the 200 soldiers stationed on the Army post in the days before CDs and DVDs. They lived on a diet of hardtack, salt pork, beans and coffee. Many deserted. Disease killed more soldiers than the Indians did.” They thought it would be exciting, an adventure," Johnson said. "It was anything but that. It would have been horrible." When their workday was over, some soldiers wandered down the road a mile to Buckland's Station, where they varied their diets with apples from the orchard and shots of liquor from the bar.
Today Buckland's Station is part of the Fort Churchill State Historic Park complex. State voters in 1990 approved a $47 million bond issue that allowed the state Parks Division to improve and add to its park system. About $5 million of the money went to the purchase of about 4,000 acres of ranch land adjacent to Fort Churchill, including the George Ghiglia ranch. Fort Churchill became a state park in 1957.
The centerpiece of the Ghiglia ranch was Buckland's Station, built at a crossing of the Carson River in 1859 by Samuel Buckland. Buckland's Station originally served as a tent hotel for travelers and a horse exchange site for the Overland Stage Co. and the Pony Express.
With a $500,000 highway enhancement grant from the Federal Highway Administration, the Parks Division last year jacked up the dilapidated station and poured a new foundation. It also put on a new roof. By using another highway grant over the next two years, the Parks Division intends to restore the interior of the old building and then in 2002 open a regional parks information center for visitors along U.S. Highway 95.
Now the ransacked interior of the station looks like what one would expect of a building abandoned in 1964. Johnson said some old-timers talk about a ghost that haunts a second floor bedroom. But he shows no sign of fear as he walks through the room. Last summer a ghost hunter stopped by and insisted upon taking photographs in the room at 10 p.m. She said her pictures showed signs of something supernatural in that room, but Johnson never saw a thing.
Eighty thousand people visited Fort Churchill last year. Another 16,000 stopped by Buckland's Station and the surrounding trails along the Carson River.
Johnson says hikers and horse riders seldom encounter others along the trails. "People come here for the solitude," he said. Johnson is busy this winter preparing a guidebook for visitors to the enlarged park. He also is painting signs for the numerous trails along the river. He said he needs to make four duplicates of each sign because the law of the West requires anyone with a gun to shoot at every sign in rural Nevada.
But Johnson marvels about the integrity over the years of the visitors to Fort Churchill. There has been no vandalism, although much of the time no rangers are on duty. In addition, about 70 percent of the guests pay the $3 entrance and $10 camping fees. Payments are made on the honor system because there are no rangers sitting in an entrance booth.
Besides expanded hiking and equestrian trails, the larger park has a primitive camp for tent campers. Deer, turkey, geese and mountain lions frequent the cottonwood strands along the river. The combining of Buckland's Station with Fort Churchill into a super park seems like destiny.
The histories have been entwined.
On May 10, 1860, a group of rowdy miners and adventurers gathered outside the station to plan strategy before riding off to war against the Paiute Indians. They intended to make the Indians pay for killing the two Williams brothers three days before at a trading post up the road. It didn't matter that the brothers had kidnapped and raped two 12-year-old Indian girls.
This time, the drunks from Carson City and Virginia City learned a lesson. Within three days, 76 of the 105 men who fought in the first battle of the Pyramid Lake War were dead. Buckland later described the avengers as men "full of whiskey" who seemed out on a "pony stealing expedition" rather than a fight to right a wrong. The Paiutes simply stood behind sagebrush and rocks and picked them off one by one.
In a departure from the thinking of the time, Buckland said the killing of the Williams brothers had been justified. "The Williams boys took the squaws into their house and ravished them," he wrote in 1879. "This act greatly incensed the Indians and they in retaliation committed various outrages on whites."
In response to the Indians' victory, more than 200 regular Army soldiers and 500 volunteers quickly banded in California. They marched to Nevada and within a month defeated the Indians. Soldiers claimed they killed 160 Indians and lost only two of their men. The Indians claimed they lost four.
To keep the peace, the Army that summer hastily constructed Fort Churchill to protect the settlers, the Pony Express and the stage. Fort Churchill remained an Army post for nine years. The primary job of the soldiers became that of ensuring that the Comstock Lode miners stood for the Union cause in the Civil War. Only one Fort Churchill solider died in combat with Indians.
Johnson, who likes to dress in Civil War garb and to address schoolchildren on the fort's history, also blames the whites for the Pyramid Lake War of 1860. "What the Indians did was justified," he said. "It is questionable whether the fort was really needed."
Today only the adobe walls of the fort remain. They are maintained in a state of arrested decay. Masons make new adobe blocks each year for the ruins. Without the masonry work, Johnson said, ruins would disappear within 30 years because of the weather. After Fort Churchill closed, Buckland bought the buildings from the Army for $750. He used the fort's lumber to build Buckland's Station into its present day character.
The two-story white house became the cornerstone of his ranch, which supplied vegetables and hay to miners and livestock throughout early Nevada. Buckland and his wife, Eliza, are buried at the cemetery at Fort Churchill. In 1884, Eliza Buckland bled to death from a cut she suffered after dropping a pitcher into the bowl in which she was washing her feet. A few months later, Sam Buckland burned to death in a fire caused by the lighted candle he kept next to his bed.