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Twenty-five years ago today, the ground shook and a roar filled the air in Washoe Valley.
And that was only the beginning.
In the mountains high above, Slide Mountain had lived up to its name.
Just before noon May 30, 1983, snow, dirt and rock slipped from the side of the mountain and crashed into Upper and Lower Price lakes, emptying them of hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and sending a 30-foot wall of debris down the Ophir Creek drainage into northwestern Washoe Valley.
Boulders the size of automobiles and full-grown trees were picked up along the way, creating a quarter-mile-wide swath that killed one man, injured at least four, destroyed four homes and damaged five others.
“It looked like toys coming down instead of the size of boulders and trees that they were,” said Rick Vawter, a firefighter with the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District who responded. “It was amazing how big they really were but how small they looked coming down the mountain.
Those huge trees, they just looked like twigs coming down there.”
At its peak, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates at the time, the water was flowing at 10,000 cubic feet per second, five times the flow of a 100-year flood.
The mudslide rushed across Old 395 between Davis Creek and Bowers Mansion and continued toward the newer U.S. 395, covering the southbound lanes in muddy slop.
A quarter century later, those boulders and other tell-tale signs of the disaster still can be seen.
“I think about it every time I go by there,” said Paul Johns, a member of the Carson City Search and Rescue Team and one of the first on the scene. “That’s not the kind of thing you forget.”
The Washoe Valley mudslide was not an isolated event, but one of several natural disasters in the Sierra that came as a result of an extremely wet winter and twice the normal snow pack, heavy rains and unseasonably warm temperatures. Flooding was widespread.

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