San Francisco Joins the Water Trail

slais Creek Park sits on a small creekside beach just off Highway 280, on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. A small patch of sand and marshy shrubbery that slopes gently to the water, the beach is surrounded on all sides by signs of industrial development: an abandoned 5-story copra crane, warehouses, and a heavy metal drawbridge that hardly ever has need to rise. Islais Creek, a once-thriving waterway bottled into a dead-end channel, has served many needs through San Francisco’s history – transport during the Gold Rush, a channel for industrial and wartime trade during World War II. Now, though, the creek has added a new designation: in September it became the first official San Francisco site on the San Francisco Bay Area Water Trail.

(Map by Lohnes+Wright, Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA, ABAG, State Coastal Conservancy)

The Water Trail is meant to serve as a kind of marine parallel to the well-established Bay Trail, and when completed would offer paddlers and recreational boaters sites to launch boats or haul out, as well as bathrooms and other facilities, to enable longer trips around the Bay. The trail added two new sites in December and is expanding in 2016 to add more, says Ben Botkin, a planner with the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), which leads the Water Trail project.

Bo Barnes, the president and founder of Kayakers Unlimited, and Fran Sticha, a longtime member of the group, helped us fit our spray skirts and life vests on the beach of Islais Creek. Barnes emphasized the importance of knowing the paddling conditions for the day. Currents, winds, tides – even on the often placid-looking Bay it’s foolish and can be downright dangerous to embark on a paddle without knowing what you will be facing. “When people lived in Nature they understood these things,” Barnes said, opening up an app on his phone. “But we have electronics now so there’s still no excuse.”

our KU members, Botkin, and I pushed off into calm water off Islais Creek Park. The air was still and though it was still early, the sun had burned away residual fog and promised a clear, warm day. Egrets soared close over the surface of the water as the kayaks cut through the protected creek, passing industrial service towers and under a low bridge that forced us to duck our heads. A salty wind backed behind us, just strong enough to provide a boost. As we paddled, the narrow channel broadened and steep concrete walls replaced the marshy sand banks.

Approaching the mouth of the creek, the wind picked up and the water became choppier, slapping insistently against the side of the kayaks. “Get ready for the Bay!” Barnes yelled as his kayak emerged from behind the protection of the concrete jetty and entered open water.

This particular morning, the waters were calm, the winds were mild, and the air was comfortingly warm – an exception of a day, the KU kayakers assured me. The giant towers of PG&E’s decommissioned Potrero power plant rose up over a small cove called Warm Water Cove – another site Botkin has considered for the Water Trail. The park contains abandoned warehouses, graffiti, and has become a gathering ground for D.I.Y. music and touring musicians. Nicknamed “Toxic Creek,” the site has been undergoing restoration and clean up efforts in recent years. It would still require several specific assets – a boat launch and storage facilities, for example – to be considered for official Water Trail designation.

For the kayakers, the experience of being on the Bay in their human-powered crafts is communion with nature, even when surrounded by the urban landscape. “I love it – nobody’s out here except seals and birds,” said KU member Mark More.

San Francisco’s bayfront legacy of industry and commercialism pervades the view. But even amidst the towers of the power plant and the industrial concrete warehouses rising up on either side, the deep blue-green waters of the Bay remain populated with fish, birds, and seals. Unpredictable currents and constantly changing winds remind the smart kayaker that the Bay is a force of nature that for all of the development hasn’t been tamed.

addling north past Pier 70, we approached Crane Cove Park, where a warehouse had been torn down for multi-use development. Currently, the lot is conspicuously empty – a flat concrete slab framed by two multi-story cranes – but Water Trail advocates like KU are helping to incorporate boat launch ramps and storage facilities into the development plan, which could allow it to be added to the Water Trail once the project is finished. In an area as developed as San Francisco, every ramp counts. “You can only get into the water at certain points,” Botkin said.

It’s not just the developed waterfront that’s a challenge to expanding the Water Trail: even in areas where there’s water access, it has traditionally been devoted to commercial and government barges, which don’t mix well with small human-powered canoes and kayaks.

To become an officially designated part of the Water Trail, a site needs waterfront access, a bathroom, facilities to store boats and general accessibility features – such as a launch point and parking. Elsewhere around the Bay, Water Trail sites also have facilities for overnight camping. The long-term goal is a site every 2-3 paddleable miles, and places to stay overnight every 8 paddleable miles. “The idea is if you’re going from place to place, where are you going to stay?” Botkin said. “It’s like backpacking in the Sierra Nevada — but instead, you’re kayaking.”

A sea lion rests on a barge near AT&T Park. (Photo by Fran Sticha, Kayakers Unlimited)

North of Crane Cove Park we enter China Basin and then McCovey Cove behind AT&T stadium, where two huge barges loom over us. As we edge around the nearest one, a sea lion pops up out the water to take a look at us, so close to the kayaks that someone could have reached out to pat its head. The sea lion submerges again and reemerges suddenly with a burst of power, landing on the lower hull of the barge, where it settles down to soak up the sun and watch us paddle by.

For the first time since beginning the paddle we encounter other people on the Bay – in kayaks and smaller motor-powered boats, floating outside the stadium to enjoy the festivities of a late-season baseball game. The smell of butter, popcorn and hotdogs wafts from the vendors and cannons explode spectacularly over our heads.

The slight turbulence of the Bay fades away as we turn up Mission Creek. We pass the row of charmingly dilapidated houseboats that fronts the shiny new glass facilities of UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. The sounds of the stadium and the Bay fade again, replaced by mostly quiet except for the interruption of squawking gulls.

A kayak view of Mission Creek. (Photo by Fran Sticha, Kayakers Unlimited) — A view from the kayak of San Francisco’s bayshore waterline. (Photo courtesy Ben Botkin, ABAG)

Mission Creek would be yet another good San Francisco Water Trail site, Botkin says. It has a low freeboard dock, an important and rare boon for kayakers. Most docks on the Bay are high freeboard that accommodate motorboats, but make it more difficult for paddlers to climb in and out of their water-level boats. It would be a nice spot, Botkin says, for novice kayakers to easily launch and gain paddling experience without the hazard of the Bay, where traffic and currents can be dicey. “Trying to incorporate a variety of experiences is a great part of the Water Trail,” he said.

Mission Creek could be a “destination” location, Botkin says, meaning its main use would be for people to hop off their boat. Other such sites include Schoonmaker beach in Sausalito, where it’s possible to pull a kayak onto the sand and have a picnic.

Water Trail organizers have also worked with the owners and managers of historic ship bunks around the Bay, such as Cass Gidley Marina in Sausalito, to add boat-building workshops, boat launches and campsites to existing facilities. In other words, not only would travelers be able to attend unique and historical programs on how boats were built, but they might also get the chance to stay on an old one. “It would be a neat experience to bunk up on an old ship,” Botkin said.

But overall, access to gear and the water are the Water Trail’s top priorities. “Having a lot of clubs, storage options and rental facilities are all important for getting more people into the sport,” Botkin said.

So far ABAG has approved 14 sites for the Water Trail. Botkin said that much of the past decade has been spent figuring out how to structure the trail and get bureaucratic approval for new sites, and he hopes now to grow it more rapidly. The Trail has no official trajectory, but, Botkin said, “the goal is as we’re able to get more sites designated there will be a natural trend towards developing certain routes for trips involving one-night stays, or two night stays.”

But that’s in the future. For today, there’s nowhere to camp and nowhere to stop, so we turn our kayaks and fight the currents to head back to Islais Creek.

Melanie Hess is a Bay Nature editorial intern.

In Tough Year for Seals and Sea Lions, Rescue Center Works Overtime

If you go by number of patients admitted in a typical year, The Marine Mammal Center is one of the largest mammal rehabilitation centers in the world. But that’s in a normal year, when 600-800 animals move through the rescue center from a stretch of 700 miles of California coast. Then there’s 2015, when after only eight months TMMC is close to surpassing its own yearly record high for number of marine mammals rescued — making it also, for this year, almost certainly one of the busiest mammal rehabilitation centers in the world.

A dramatic warm-up in the Pacific Ocean has made conditions tough for marine mammals, and as of August TMMC had rescued 1,500 animals, said TMMC Conservation Medicine Veterinarian Claire Simeone. Almost 1,200 of those rescues were California sea lions, Simeone said, most of them starving pups.

“The staff and volunteers have been putting in a lot of hours in the busy season,” Simeone said.

At one point in March the center in Sausalito, which technically has a capacity of 225 animals, was hosting a record 311 patients. Since most of those animals were skinny, starving pups, Simeone said, the center was able to fit more of them in — but still, it wasn’t easy. More than 1,100 volunteers helped prepare medications, clean cages, and feed the animals. “For 300 adult animals we would not have space,” Simeone said. “We were constantly reevaluating whether or not we had reached capacity – it was definitely a strain on our resources.”

Rescued young sea lions swim in the pool at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. (Photo by Ingrid Overgard, courtesy The Marine Mammal Center)

By mid-July the traffic had calmed down to 56 patients. A sea lion flopped unwillingly from one pen to another, guided by two volunteers holding giant wooden boards that look like shields. Other pinnipeds basked in the sun or took occasional dips in the pools in their pens, which look like built-in Jacuzzis extending toward the coast. The veterinary facilities also feature X-ray machines, ultrasounds, surgical equipment, and even giant blenders for food preparation.

“Our hospital is very similar to what you would experience in a human hospital,” Simeone said.

TMMC’s full-time staff includes four full-time veterinarians, an intern veterinarian and several part-time vets. The center also serves as a teaching hospital where foreign exchange veterinarian students train for three-month periods. With ocean temperatures remaining high — it was 67 degrees in Monterey Bay on August 12 — and a strong El Niño forecast to keep them high through at least early next year, there likely won’t be a slowdown next year, either.

California’s coastal upwelling, which supports the fish that feed the sea lions and other marine mammals, has stalled, and the fish have headed farther north or out to sea to chase cooler water. Sea lion mothers have been forced to go farther in search of food, abandoning or losing their pups because they weren’t able to provide them the nutrition that they needed.

In previous El Niño years, the center has seen similarly large numbers of starving animals – in 2009, with a moderate El Niño, the center had 1,643 admits in one year, and in 1998, during one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded, 1,130 marine mammals were admitted. But the degree of the warming in the last year has been unprecedented – much of it took place last fall, before an El Niño had even been declared.

A rehabilitated sea lion makes its way back into the wild. (Photo by Jay Conner, courtesy The Marine Mammal Center) — Volunteers from The Marine Mammal Center release California sea lions at Chimney Rock in Point Reyes National Seashore in 2014. (Photo by Jay Conner, courtesy The Marine Mammal Center)

Despite the bad year, though, the California sea lion population is thriving overall, with more than 300,000 sea lions living along the West Coast. Saving starving pups, Simeone said, doesn’t necessarily make much of a big-picture difference for the species itself, but it offers valuable lessons about sea lion conservation. TMMC collaborates with more than 30 institutions around the world and hosts a variety of ongoing research projects. Though El Niño and climate change are part of a larger phenomenon, by studying the animals that are stranded along the coast, the center seeks to better understand the localized effects on our ocean environment.

It’s difficult to predict what the next year will look like for the California sea lions, though NOAA models say there’s a greater than 90 percent chance that El Niño will continue into 2016. “For the sake of the animals, we are always hopeful that we will not have a busy year,” Simeone said. “But given what we’ve seen with the California sea lions over the past few years as well as our previous experience with El Niño conditions, we are preparing for another busy year.”

The Marine Mammal Center will hold its annual fundraiser, Run for the Seals, this weekend. Find more pictures, videos, and information about the center at its web page, marinemammalcenter.org.

What Could You Do With 13 Acres of Brand-New Parkland In San Francisco’s Presidio?

an Francisco’s Presidio has undergone major landscape changes in the last few centuries, from dunes and scrub to military base to today’s mix of forests and wildlife, family picnics, and community events. It has also, of course, been home to a major highway, the Doyle Drive connector leading up to the Golden Gate Bridge, an interruption in the park’s natural life that artificially separates the waterfront from the greater Presidio parklands. A few years ago, though, Caltrans decided to sink that road into a tunnel, and fill in on top of it, removing the highway presence in the park and creating 13 acres of new land. And that just left the question: what to do with the new space?

In January 2014 the New Presidio Parklands Project received $25 million from the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, the largest grant in Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy history, to try and answer the question. The grant funded roughly half the project, and allowed a tri-agency partnership, led in large part by the Presidio Trust, to hire a team of professional landscape architects from the James Corner Field Operations — famous for their work on Manhattan’s High Line Park — to come to San Francisco every month to plan the new parklands.

Get Our Newsletter

It’s not easy to design and plan for land that doesn’t exist yet. The solution was to phase in the project in three stages: “imagine”, “design”, and “build,” with the goal of opening the park in 2018.

The Presidio Trust and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy then decided to open up the imagining and designing part to the public. “Community engagement grew out of our aspirations for the project,” said Michael Boland, the Presidio Parklands project manager. “We knew it would only be a success if the community was involved.”

So the first big decision – what design team to hire – became a popular contest, with five design teams displaying their visions for the tunnel-top park for people to view. More than 7,000 people participated in meetings, went on tours, and came through an open gallery exhibiting the five ideas, and, the Presidio Trust says, by popular demand Corner’s design was chosen. For the High Line project in New York, the Corner team transformed an abandoned strip of elevated railway tracks into a living landscape that winds through the city as the tracks do. They’ve taken the same approach of incorporating nature into the city for the Presidio. “His team was by far the one that the community thought had the right feeling,” Boland said. “The design was simple, open, adaptable. The real emphasis was on environmental restoration and the use of native plants.”

University of Pennsylvania Master of Landscape Architecture graduate student Boqian Xu (left), Tan Chow of the Chinatown Community Development Center (middle), and Amor Santiago of APA Family Support Services (right) look at proposed designs for the Presidio Parklands with Ariel Wang of the Presidio Trust, as part of a community outreach meeting at the Chinatown YMCA. (Photo by Stella Zouridakis, courtesy Presidio Trust) — University of Pennsylvania Master of Landscape Architecture graduate student Boqian Xu (left), Tan Chow of the Chinatown Community Development Center (middle), and APA Family Support Services Executive Director Amor Santiago (right) look at proposed designs for the Presidio Parklands with Ariel Wang of the Presidio Trust, as part of a community outreach meeting at the Chinatown YMCA. (Photo by Stella Zouridakis, courtesy Presidio Trust)

In public meetings around the City in the last six months, residents have weighed in on the design – which now, in a semi-final form, reflects that diverse input. With the design still in a public comment phase, the Presidio Trust is offering weekly public tours of the site through September.

As it is now, on the inland side of where the highway was, where the new parklands begin, the transit and visitor centers will remain. A wide walkway will lead toward a central lawn, which narrows as it ambles toward the waterfront. Paths head up the cliff, along the bluff, or down into the East Meadow, which lies directly on top of the tunneled highway. The lawn and meadow will have recreational facilities for sports and picnics. On the coastal side of the underground highway, where there would be a richer ecosystem, walkways meander amongst arrays of native plants, including a region that is described as a “learning landscape,” designed to give visitors a chance to interact with and better understand Northern California horticulture. “Even though the land itself is new, we have a lot of context to work with,” Boland said.

But one lesson from the community design sessions is not to focus just on the physical space, but on the programs it might offer. The designs include a youth center and amphitheater, and there’s a general emphasis on getting young visitors into nature. ”These parklands were created to bring urban populations natural park experiences,” Boland said. “The research suggests that it’s best to start with children if you want to have a meaningful impact on their lives.”

Find out more about the site design and history, or sign up for a tour at http://newpresidioparklands.org/