Exploring Nature in the San Francisco Bay Area
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How Sausal Creek made Oakland

How do you develop a booming Oakland when there’s a big creek in your way? Bury it underground, cement it over, channel it with culverts, and turn it into a gravel quarry. Sounds like a plan, right?

Sausal Creek has undoubtedly taken a lot of abuse. But one thing must be said: Oakland owes much of its economy to the roughly 3-mile creek that meanders from its headwaters in the Oakland Hills to the San Francisco Bay.

Without Sausal Creek, there wouldn’t have been the ecosystem to support the massive redwood and oak forests that fed a voracious lumber industry. Nor would there have been water to grow the first orchards that sent fruit as far as the East Coast, or to quench the thirst of a growing East Bay population.

Before the settlers
Long before European appetites arrived, Sausal Creek was part of a network of free-flowing waterways that drained the East Bay’s redwood-covered hills, grassy fields, and marshy lowlands to the ocean. Sausal creek and its banks teemed with life: frogs, snakes, salmon, salamanders, among countless birds like sparrows and wrens, living in the live oaks, red alders, and big-leaf maples on the creek banks. The Ohlone people depended on the creek for fresh water, and hunted and fished along the banks.

This was the Eden that the King of Spain gave to Luis Maria Peralta in 1820 as a gift for his military service. The 44,800-acre parcel – called Rancho San Antonio – encompassed all of Oakland and beyond, from El Cerrito to San Leandro.

The forests easily provided enough wood for the Peralta family. But San Francisco, the boomtown across the Bay that sprung up with the Gold Rush, created a new demand for lumber. Sausal Creek became the site of 10 sawmills, and by 1855 the watershed’s ancient redwoods, thought to be the largest in the world, were completely gone (the trees you see today are plantings or stump growths from the original clear-cutting frenzy).

Striking it rich
Further downstream, the fertile soils of Sausal Creek attracted others hoping to strike it rich – German orchardists. Following a Johnny Appleseed dream, Henderson Lewelling came in 1856 with 700 cherry, apple, and hops seedlings he hauled across the country. He dubbed his property along Sausal Creek “Fruit Vale” (the site of today’s Fruitvale district in Oakland) and began California’s first commercial production of fruit. By 1870, another German agriculturalist, Friedrich Rhoda, was exporting his Royal Ann cherries, grown in rich Sausal Creek soil, as the first California fruit samples to the East Coast.

As Fruit Vale continued to grow, many wealthy landowners built estates that backed up to Sausal Creek. Hugh Dimond, a lucky gold prospector, bought property along Sausal Creek that is now a city park and canyon bearing his name. His son, Denis, built his clubhouse along Sausal Creek and hid champagne bottles in the neighboring oak tree (that tree was believed to be the oldest oak tree in Oakland, but was cut down in 2005 due to disease). The Dimond family also briefly dammed Sausal Creek to make a large swimming hole, near the site of the current Dimond Park Pool.

Sausal Creek’s floodplain provided estate owners with lush gardens; footpaths were often built across the creek to connect estates. Beer gardens sprung up along the banks, such as Teppers, remains of which can be seen today behind 2024 Macarthur Boulevard. Another Sausal Creek neighbor was a wealthy ship captain, who also happened to be an exotic shrub connoisseur, and he built an estate at the creek and planted palms, magnolias, rose bushes, and many other non-natives along the water’s edge.

streetcar

Fruitvale streetcar.

Sunday drivers

Horse-drawn streetcars were common in the Fruit Vale area by the mid 1870s, and often brought people up Dimond Canyon for Sunday picnics along Sausal Creek, where they could pluck native strawberries and blackberries right off the vine. Sausal Creek provided water to the residents of Fruit Vale and Brooklyn (East Oakland) when the Sausal Creek Water Company was founded in 1870 (bought two years later by Anthony Chabot’s Contra Costa Water Company).

Improved streetcar technology and the San Francisco earthquake of 1905 led to more population growth along the banks of Sausal Creek. Lower Fruit Vale became home to a cannery, an oil refinery right at the foot of Sausal Creek, and several finishing mills that supplied lumber to build more housing and businesses.

As automobiles came into the picture, grease and oil runoff spilled into Sausal Creek. Those who still swam and played in the creek reported that the fish disappeared. In 1923  the East Bay Municipal Utility District formed, providing the residents of Oakland with new fresh water sources.

Sausal Creek’s powerful flow naturally deposited sediment into San Leandro Bay, so the county decided to use the creek bed as a gravel quarry for the developing city. They dug Sausal Creek out to a depth of 25 feet each year, until the next winter floods refilled it with sediment. The lower part of Sausal Creek was culverted underground in an attempt to control what was seen as its violent torrent, and the former slough was converted to a channel deep enough for ships, making Alameda an island city. 

sawmill

Sausal Creek sawmills.

Sausal Creek — a problem?
Throughout the early 20th century, new homes and roads covered soil and vegetation around the creek that would typically absorb rainwater, causing the creek to run higher and faster during periods of heavy rainfall. As the banks eroded, the creek widened, flooding and ruining homes, and residents began to view the creek as a problem rather than an attractive neighborhood amenity. Even today, during heavy rains, parts of Dimond park flood due to the development in the hills.

Workers poured cement into Sausal Creek’s bed to attempt to slow it down, but the creek’s natural ability to evade and erode won out in the end. In areas of lower Fruit Vale where roads needed to be built, the creek was directed underground.

In 1950, the Montclair golf course was built, and another portion of Sausal Creek was buried. In the 1980s, many more sections of the creek were culverted because of safety concerns. Today, nearly half of Sausal Creek lies beneath city streets.

The transformation of Sausal Creek has led to the establishment of a vibrant and multicultural community of 40,000 in the Fruitvale district, but ecological diversity of the watershed had suffered.
 
Invasive, fast-growing monocultures of Cape ivy and Himalayan blackberry ravage the watershed and out-compete the native plants that are essential for a healthy ecosystem. Underground, culverted creek sections prevent native Steelhead trout from living and laying eggs in the creek. Urban runoff drains contaminants into the waterways and kills aquatic life.

Restoring the creek
Restoring and protecting the creek is the mission of Friends of Sausal Creek an organization established in 1996 with support from the City of Oakland, Aquatic Outreach Institute, and the Alameda County Flood Control and Water Conservation District. Each Saturday the group works with volunteers at one of the 12 active restoration sites in the watershed. They remove trash and invasive weeds, monitor water quality, plant natives with local seed stock, and educate the community about the importance of the watershed.

Along Sausal Creek, opossums from Virginia snack on blackberries from Armenia, but things are improving, said Friends of Sausal Creek Executive Director Kimra McAfee.

“In the creek we have rainbow trout, that’s one of the exciting things about Sausal Creek,” she said. “They cannot make that trek out to the ocean and back, but we see all sizes of rainbow trout from fingerlings to 9 to 11 inch trout, so we know they’re reproducing.”

The Sausal Creek watershed gave all of its resources to developing Fruit Vale. Maybe now the favor can be returned.
 

A Wiggle in Time

If you ride your bike in San Francisco, chances are you have discovered The Wiggle, and you’re probably thankful you did. The meandering one-mile route from Duboce Ave to Fell St. saves cyclists from notoriously steep hills as they make their way from downtown to western neighborhoods.

There’s a reason why the riding is easy. The bike route approximately follows what was once stream bed in a place called San Souci Valley, now thoroughly transformed into the Victorian-dotted neighborhoods of Duboce Triangle and the Lower Haight.

 It’s been a well-trodden path for thousands of years starting with the Ohlone, said Joel Pomerantz, the natural historian who coined the term “The Wiggle” in a 1994 article in the Tubular Times. The Ohlone used the route to hike between two villages in the regions now known as the Mission and the Presidio.
 
“The one at the Mission was like a base camp for summer gatherings for when they came together to gather acorns in the hills, or seeds from the grasses,” Pomerantz said on one of his recent Thinkwalks tours. “In the winter they would go down and get oysters and other things from the Bay.”

Later, Spanish explorer Juan Bautista De Anza may have used that same trail in his quest

San Souci

to find a spot for The Mission. He came across a big spring of subterranean water that bubbled out of the dunes somewhere around present day Duboce Avenue, ran down Church and 15th streets, and emptied into marshlands near 14th and Mission streets. That water has mostly been diverted into sewers.

The Mission padres diverted most of the water from the stream, named Ojo de Agua de los Dolores (Dolores Spring), into irrigation ditches and drinking water.

They reserved another stream, winding down from Twin Peaks to 18th Street, for the cattle. Traveling up from Monterey to establish the new Mission, it’s believed Spanish missionary Padre Francisco Palóu, out of confusion or exhaustion, stopped south of De Anza’s suggestion to set up camp, and in his journal called the 18th Street stream Arroyo Dolores.

Just shy of the suggested location for the Mission, Palóu recited the first mass, enslaved the native Ohlones to work, and Mission San Francisco de Asís, (nicknamed “Mission Dolores”) was created in the very spot it sits today. 

Revising the history

It was this same stream De Anza stumbled upon that led Pomerantz to believe The Wiggle was alongside a streambed, but he’s since realized that’s only partially correct. The creek slowly eroded the green serpentine bedrock between Market St. and Duboce Ave as it flowed toward the sea, forming a portion of The Wiggle’s path. The rest of the route would have been too sandy for a great stream to flow across it, and instead has been shaped by the developing city. This brimming waterway is a prominent feature of the Duboce Bikeway Mural, a fantastical depiction of The Wiggle route created by a team led by Pomerantz.

“The more research I do, the more I realize that the stream that we imagined had nothing whatsoever to do with what’s here. The shape of the landscape is so carved and sculpted by human activity. Most of the area was sand, so the flow across it would have been sunken in – not like this sort of idealized version,” said Pomerantz.

The greenish outcroppings of serpentine visible from the Duboce Ave. mural indicate man-made transformations to the area. The slashed hillside below the U.S. Mint is the result of the construction of Market and Dolores streets for access to the rapidly growing Mission District.

The top of the hill where the U.S Mint now sits was cut away in 1861 to make way for a gravity fed reservoir to supply the developing district with water. The hill was chopped yet again in 1937 when the Mint was installed to turn miners’ gold into coins. The only remnant of the reservoir today is the little noticed Reservoir St., otherwise known as the entrance to the Safeway parking lot, on the opposite side of The Wiggle’s start.

The Wiggle is so popular with cyclists that there are official street signs marking the route for almost its entire length. According to Pomerantz, the official name for a proposed sewer project in the lower Haight is “The Wiggle Main”, which seems appropriate given its watery history. There is even a community organization called “The Wigg Party,” which advocates for the neighborhood surrounding The Wiggle to be a leader in sustainability.

“Its actually gradually going to be named The Wiggle neighborhood,” Pomerantz said with a laugh, “Some people are happy to call it Lower Haight or something. I think Wiggle is going to win in the end”

SF Bay Model reopens after facelift

The San Francisco Bay Model is running wet again, now that the dust has settled on a nearly 2-year renovation project. 

The scale replica of the bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta system has been largely out of the public eye — and dry —  as construction crews upgraded the building and installed new exhibits and solar panels. Now, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which runs the 1.5 acre model on a sea-front building in Sausalito, is welcoming visitors again, starting with a grand re-opening celebration on Saturday. 

“Most people think of a model and they think a model train, or a model car – something that you can have on your coffee table or something,” said Chris Gallagher, Park Manager at the Bay Model. “Just the sheer vastness of it — people are fascinated by that.”

 The model is indeed massive — 320-feet long by 400-feet wide —  and underscores the true size of the San Francisco Bay, which covers 1,600 square miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Sacramento Delta. Compared to the model, the bay’s water is a hundred times deeper, distances are a thousand times larger, and the bay’s water is a million times greater. Looking out at the water near the miniature Bay Bridge, an hour in real time passes every thirty-six seconds in the model.  As tides come and go, a day passes in just under fifteen minutes. 

The upgrades were made possible by a $15.5 million federal stimulus grant. They include nearly 2,500 solar panels to power the 145,000 square-foot building and neighboring dock, seismic upgrades, spruced up facilities, and new fish tanks filled with starfish and rainbow trout. 

“It’s not like walking into a newly renovated house with all new furniture,” said Gallagher. “A lot of the work is underneath the model. We got a lot of major renovations done that we probably won’t be able to do again for a long time, because our budget just gets cut and cut and cut.”

The Army Corps began building the model in the late 1950s in response to proposals to dam sections of the bay as freshwater reservoirs. The Corps built in features that would affect water flow into the bay, such as shipping channels, rivers, sloughs, canals in the Delta, piers, wharfs, and bridges. 

Scientists using the model soon realized that the bay was a mere 12 to 18 feet deep in sections and would dry up faster than it would fill with fresh water. In the late 1960s, the model expanded to include the Suisun Bay and the Delta, and scientists and engineers tested the effects of levee failures, dredging, and oil spills. The model’s usefulness as a scientific research tool ended in 2000 as computers took its place. 

Since then, the bay model has been kept open as a unique educational tool. Gallagher said visitors come to realize that the San Francisco Bay is more than just Alcatraz and Angel islands. 

“It stretches all the way to the South bay, all the way to Stockton and Sacramento,” she said. “People don’t tend to see it that way until they can view it all in one place. You can really see the interconnectedness of the bay. What you do in one part of the bay really does affect what happens in another area of it. It’s not as isolated as you think.”

The grand re-opening celebration will be held this Saturday, February 25th from 11am-4pm at the Bay Model Visitor Center in Sausalito. The ceremony will be held at 2pm.

Presidio’s forest resists the sands of time

On a sunny day in San Francisco, you might find yourself walking through the Presidio – taking in some fresh air, finding respite among the trees, or enjoying views of the San Francisco Bay.

What you may not know, though, is that if you had been walking through that same area 130 years ago, you’d be trudging through sand dunes. 

Sand, and lots of it – that’s what makes up the natural habitat of the Presidio. Salt, wind, and sand-loving plants like the blue-violet dune gilia, thrived in this terrain alongside the grizzly bears, wolves, and coyotes that frequented the area before the arrival of Europeans.

Once they did arrive on the sandy mounds, soldiers soon realized that despite the sweeping views, the Presidio was not a charming seaside fort. The endless dunes and bluffs seemed to be a wasteland – the few naturally surviving trees were cut down and used for fuel. Bay winds barraged the soldiers with sand and turned their homes into deserts. In 1883, one man had a plan to transform the Presidio into something more palatable to European tastes.

A man with a plan

Major William Albert Jones, an engineer, drew up the preparations for developing the Presidio. He believed that planting a forest would not only create a much-needed windbreak, but that the transformation of sand into woodland would dazzle San Franciscans.

dunes

More than 130 years ago, the Presidio was coastal sand dunes, a landscape the U.S. Army successfully transformed as an engineering feat to dazzle San Francisco. 

“The main idea is, to crown the ridges, border the boundary fences, and cover the areas of sand and marsh waste with a forest that will generally seem continuous, and thus appear immensely larger than it really is,” Jones wrote in an 1883 planning document for the Presidio. 

He continued: “In order to make the contrast from the city seem as great as possible, and indirectly accentuate the idea of the power of the Government, I have surrounded all the entrances with dense masses of wood.”

The area’s soil was a mixture of sand and serpentinite, the blue-green California state rock. This made for a soil that was poor at retaining water and nutrients, and too high in toxic metals for anything to thrive that hadn’t adapted there over the millennia. Taking notes from the newly created Golden Gate Park, the U.S. Army brought in horse manure collected  from the city’s main commercial thoroughfare on Market Street and mixed it into the existing soil. This addition, combined with initial experiments planting various sand-trapping grasses, created an environment where trees could grow.

The first official planting took place on the first celebration of Arbor Day in California. By 1907, thousands of Monterey cypress and Monterey pine (both California natives but nonnative to the area) and imported Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus densely crowded the Presidio.

 

Preserving the Forest

In 1962, 300 acres of the historic forest became a protected landmark, with many of the same tree species remaining today. Because of this status, if any trees are removed, they have to be replaced with another of their kind.

That may sound restrictive, but Peter Ehrlich, the Presidio Trust forester, has found creative ways to improve the historic forest.

“Since 1886 to 1910 is a very short amount of time to plant 100,000 trees, they basically created an even-aged forest,” he said. “Because of that, they’re all declining at the same time – especially the cypress and pines.”

Since 2003, the Presidio Trust’s reforestation team has removed and replaced two and a half acres of trees each year, to create a healthier, uneven aged thicket. Ehrlich believes it will take 65 years to get through the conifers planted by the Army.  He said he has also had success with disease-resistant Monterey Pines, and is seeking out a similar replacement for the Monterey cypress. 

Meanwhile, Tasmanian blue gum – a highly invasive, rapidly reproducing, Australian eucalyptus, makes up nearly half of the historic forest. If any of these trees are removed, they still have to be replaced with eucalyptus because of the landmark status. But Ehrlich has a solution for that too, and has been experimenting with less invasive eucalypts, like the slow-flowering mountain gum, to preserve the original design intent of the plantation but without the harmful consequences.

Sands of time

Managing the forest is complicated. The challenge the Army faced with the soil still holds true; the persistent sandy soils have to be amended each time new trees are planted in the dunes. Three hundred yards of well-cured, organic compost is added to each half-acre plantation to increase the water holding capacity of the sand, which helps get the new trees started.

new tree

The Presidio Trust replaces 2.5 acres of trees each year from the historic forest in an effort to create unevenly aged growth. Photo by Wolfgang Schubert.

Getting new trees to grow isn’t the only challenge. The historic trees have been damaged by storms and are still recovering from the Army’s tree topping techniques. Debates rage on with native plant advocates over how the historic forest should be restored.

But the forest is more than just a leafy addition to the Presidio grounds. Around 300 bird species have been identified at the Presidio, many of which make their home in the forest. Great horned owls, red-tailed hawks, and downy woodpeckers, and others find habitat in the trees. 

Increasing biodiversity is one of Ehrlich’s major goals, and he is leading the effort to create height diversity in the canopy for birds that call the lower branches home.

“Birds like to nest in the holes in the dead limbs, so some of the older trees provide habitat for birds that wouldn’t otherwise be here,” Ehrlich said. “We also recently had bluebirds return.”