The Hermit of Pinto Hot Springs: "Three Fingers" and the Black Rock Desert

Out past Gerlach, where the pavement gives way and the Black Rock Desert opens into one of the emptiest quarters of the Great Basin, there is a warm spring called Pinto. It sits in the northeast arm of the playa, closer to the Oregon line than to any town, and for a few strange weeks in the summer of 1978 it was the center of one of the most unsettling stories in northern Nevada's back country. A hermit with a history of mental illness, an old Basque prospector, and a young couple from Colorado hunting a lost mine were all drawn to the same remote spring — and three of them did not leave.

We tell this one carefully. It is a true-crime story, which is not our usual register around the Eclection, and it concerns real people with real families. What follows leans on the contemporaneous newspaper record — the Los Angeles Times of July 10, 1978, and the Reno Gazette-Journal (then the Reno Evening Gazette) of June 29, 1978 — with the gaps and the later folklore flagged as such. Pinto Hot Springs is remote public land and the desert around it is unforgiving; this is history told from the archive, not a travel suggestion.

A Spring in the Empty Quarter

The Black Rock Desert is a hundred miles of dry lakebed and wrinkled mountain in northwestern Nevada, now largely within the Black Rock Desert–High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area, administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The Times called it “a harsh, arid area with many colorful legends and myths, a place where prospectors still search for riches.” Pinto Mountain Hot Springs lies out in the northeast arm of the playa, reached in 1978 by miles of dirt track from the Battle Creek Ranch. It was, the paper noted, about as far from anywhere as Nevada gets: “a vast series of mountain ranges and valleys, a wrinkled desert sparsely populated by cattle ranchers, old prospectors and hermits.”

That emptiness is the whole point of the story. Everyone who came to Pinto came because it was far away. The deserts east and north of here are full of such places; we have written before about the silver camp of Aurora and the short-lived desert stop at Jessup.

Three Fingers

The hermit was Ronald John Gress, 43 in 1978, though he preferred the name he had given himself: Bristlewolf. By the Times' account he had been released from the Oregon State Hospital in 1968 and drifted southeast, “searching for a remote canyon or spring where he could live alone, isolated, cut off from his chaotic past.”

The name the lawmen used for him was “Three Fingers.” It came, the Times reported, from “an accident Gress had had with dynamite or nitroglycerine not long after he had come into the Black Rock Desert in 1968. The explosion tore three of the fingers from his right hand and smashed his face, breaking his nose.” Later retellings of his life hold that he walked miles through a snowstorm for help after the blast — a detail we find in the folklore that has since grown up around him rather than in the 1978 news coverage, which records only the injury itself.

He was not an easy neighbor. In 1975, living in a canyon in the Jackson Mountains, he was reported by ranchers for scavenging from cow carcasses and stealing apples; when two deputies came to check whether the hermit was starving or needed medical help, the Times says, he “threw coffee in the face of one lawman and threatened the other with a knife.” A Winnemucca judge, Norman L. Doughty, found the threat too inconsequential to hold him, and the charges were dismissed. Afterward Gress moved his camp — about fifteen miles down across the flats, the paper says — to Pinto Mountain Hot Springs.

What he built there impressed even the officers who later searched it. He dug a two-room shelter, ran hot-spring water to an irrigated garden and a makeshift “hothouse” of plastic sheeting, and lived off what the desert and the road gave him. Officials who examined the camp told the Times that although it looked primitive, it was “skillfully constructed to withstand the extreme cold of winter and the heat of summer.” People who had met him said the obvious: he wanted to be left alone.

The Blue Bucket and the Lost Mine

What drew the couple from Colorado was not the hermit but a legend. The Times framed it as “the romance of the Western desert prospecting — and the legend of a lost mine, perhaps the Blue Bucket.” The Lost Blue Bucket, sometimes called the Lost Hardin Lode, dates to the 1850s, when a gold-rush wagon train on a shortcut across the Black Rock Desert let its children gather pretty rocks, some in a blue bucket. Only in California, the story goes, was it found that the rocks were high-grade silver ore — and no one could ever say exactly where on the playa they had been picked up.

Richard Weese, 40, ran a small construction business in Longmont, Colorado, and prospected as an avocation. The story of a lost mine in the Black Rock had been told in his family for years; his sister, Mrs. Norma Conaway of Berthoud, told the paper their father had prospected the area back in the 1940s, guided by a map or a description handed down from an old-timer. In June 1978, Richard and his wife, Judy, 36, checked into the Wagon Wheel Motel in the tiny border settlement of Denio and told the operator, J. H. Eaton, that they were going into the Black Rock to look for a lost mine. They had a map, they said, and planned to stay out only a day or two.

The Summer of 1978

They did not come back. Their probable time of death was later set at about June 15 or 16. The old prospector, Pete Cachenaut — 75, a Basque sheepherder who had come to the Black Rock half a century earlier and stayed to run wild mustangs and prospect for gold and silver — had befriended Gress in the past. When he drove up to the springs in his four-wheel-drive, the Times reported, he was shot twice, leading officers to believe he was killed because he had discovered the bodies.

The find came on a Saturday, when two young rock hunters from Reno drove out from the Battle Creek Ranch to the springs, saw the bodies lying in the open, and fled back to telephone the sheriff's office. At dawn the next day, Humboldt County Sheriff Frank Weston and his deputies went in. As they approached, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported, Gress tried to flee up a nearby mountain road on a small three-wheeled vehicle in the cold of the morning. He was taken without the gunfight that empty country might have invited.

Lawmen and prosecutors said they could find no motive. The Weeses were strangers to the hermit; privately, some investigators speculated to the Times that he had simply reacted to what he felt was an intrusion on his domain.

The Law and the Hermit

Gress was jailed in Winnemucca and, early one Wednesday, moved to Lake's Crossing near Reno — the state facility for psychiatric evaluation — then returned to the Humboldt County jail when he refused to cooperate with the psychiatrists. On July 5, 1978, the Times reported, a Humboldt County grand jury returned three indictments charging him with the killings, and he was held without bail. In court he asked to be identified not as Gress but as Ronald John Bristlewolf. Officials remarked, with some surprise, that he spoke clearly and “sounded like an educated man.” The only subject on which he would talk at length, the paper said, was his preferred name.

By the accounts gathered since — a community desert-history wiki, regional writers, and Nevada prison records — Gress was convicted and given three consecutive life terms, and died in the state prison system in 2013, at about 78. Those later sources disagree among themselves on several particulars, including whether he stood trial or was ruled unfit and some of the ages and spellings, which is why we lean on the 1978 newspapers for the core of the story and treat the rest as the folklore it has become.

At a Glance: The Pinto Hot Springs Killings

• Pinto Mountain Hot Springs sits in the northeast arm of the Black Rock Desert, far out past Gerlach toward the Oregon border.
• The hermit Ronald John Gress — who called himself Bristlewolf and was nicknamed “Three Fingers” after a dynamite accident cost him three fingers and broke his nose — settled at the spring after his 1968 release from the Oregon State Hospital.
• In June 1978 a Colorado couple, Richard and Judy Weese, in the desert hunting the legendary Lost Blue Bucket Mine, and a 75-year-old Basque prospector, Pete Cachenaut, were shot at the springs.
• Humboldt County Sheriff Frank Weston arrested Gress after two Reno rock hunters found the bodies; a grand jury indicted him on three counts on July 5, 1978.
• Investigators found no motive. The contemporaneous coverage ran in the Los Angeles Times (July 10, 1978) and the Reno Gazette-Journal (June 29, 1978).
• Later accounts say Gress drew three consecutive life terms and died in prison in 2013; details in those secondary sources vary.

A Note on Pinto Hot Springs

The spring is still out there, on public land in the northeast arm of the Black Rock Desert, and so is the memory of the man who ruled over it. This is genuinely remote country — no services, no signal, roads that punish the wrong vehicle. We mention it only as the documented setting of this history, not as a destination. If you travel anywhere in the Black Rock, go prepared, go with someone, and tread lightly on the desert and its past.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was “Three Fingers” Bristlewolf?

Ronald John Gress, a hermit who preferred the name Bristlewolf. He settled at Pinto Mountain Hot Springs in the Black Rock Desert after 1968 and, in 1978, was charged with killing three people there. The nickname came from a dynamite or nitroglycerine accident that tore three fingers from his right hand.

Where is Pinto Hot Springs?

In the northeast arm of the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada, out past Gerlach toward Denio and the Oregon line. It is remote public land with no services.

What is the Lost Blue Bucket Mine?

A gold-rush-era legend, sometimes called the Lost Hardin Lode, about a wagon-train shortcut across the Black Rock Desert in the 1850s. Children were said to have gathered rocks that later proved to be high-grade silver ore, in a spot no one could relocate. It was that legend that drew the Weeses to the desert in 1978.

Was the case really in the Los Angeles Times?

Yes. The Los Angeles Times ran “Hermit Key Figure in Desert Slayings Probe,” by staff writer Ronald B. Taylor, on July 10, 1978. The Reno Gazette-Journal and other regional papers covered the discovery in late June 1978.

Conclusion

The story of Pinto Hot Springs is a hard one, but it belongs to the real Nevada — the one past the end of the pavement, where lost-mine legends still pull people into country that does not forgive mistakes. A couple chasing a family map, an old sheepherder who had outlasted the camps, and a damaged man who wanted only to be left alone all met at the same warm spring in the summer of 1978. We keep the Weeses and Pete Cachenaut in mind in the telling; they were real people, and the desert remembers them as much as it remembers the hermit.

We are always talking about Nevada's back-country history at The Eclection, and you can meet us in person at the Reno Antique Faire. To bring a piece of the old desert era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points:

• Online Nevada Encyclopedia — articles on Nevada history, people, and places.
• Nevada Historical Society — the state museum and research library for Nevada history.
• Bureau of Land Management — the Black Rock Desert–High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area.

Hero photograph: the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, by Ken Lund, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.