This picture of a shade house was taken at McDermitt in 1925. It looks primitive and rough but was instead a very elegant solution to the use of a non-native technology, the wood cookstove.
Only if you've cooked on a wood cookstove in an enclosed dwelling on the Black Rock desert can you truly appreciate the genius of the shade house. Made of juniper posts and its top woven of willows, water could be sloshed over the willow roof quickly, making it a form of evaporative cooler. Heat from a cookstove dissipated far more quickly out the open sides. And they were large enough for people to sleep in the comparative coolness.
It was such a brilliant solution to the wood cookstove problem that local ranchers picked it up. They too built these structures outside in the summer and set their wood stoves, dining tables and chairs inside.
The common use of shade houses ended when another change in technology - propane gas and electricity - reached out into the desert, making the wood cookstove mostly obsolete.
Compiled by Barbara Powell, nevadasdesertlegends.com, nevadaphotoarchive.com.
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