A great egret takes to the sky from a nearby pool. Rusty marsh wrens call to each other from common reeds. In the distance, a white-tailed kite glides above uplands.
It’s a clear and pleasant morning in late September at Pacheco Marsh—a 237-acre redesigned salt marsh landscape in Martinez that opened in May 2025. Although surrounded by industry, its 2.5 miles of new trails and navigable sloughs for canoes, kayaks, and paddleboards feel like a wetland in balance, its pools and uplands pulsing with life.
Dave and I roll our canoe cart about a quarter mile down a paved trail to the small-craft boat launch. We’ve waited until my NOAA Tide Alert app tells me that the tide is halfway to its peak of 5.39 feet so we can paddle on a rising tide.
But our journey begins unexpectedly. At the launch, I sit in the bow of the canoe, holding on to a cleat to steady it as Dave steps into the stern. But his weight causes the canoe to pull away, forcing him into an ever-widening split, with one foot on the dock and the other in the boat. Like an improv comedy move, he drops into the water butt first, tilting the boat enough to pour me into the water, too. With determination, we slosh through waist-deep water and climb into the boat from shore, our sandals thick with the silty bottom, baptized and ready to go.
Wet and muddy but not cold, we paddle downstream against a gentle tide toward Suisun Bay. The slough is wide, the water calm, and the banks thick with common reed, cattails, tule, and an occasional marsh gum plant with cheery-yellow flowers.
We slide beneath an aluminum footbridge as cliff swallows swoop below the span. The channel narrows, and we put our backs into paddling toward the slough’s open mouth—the site of a breached levee and the gateway to Suisun Bay.
Pacheco Marsh is the manifestation of a shared vision: to restore what for many years was a drained, diked, and dry wasteland filled with dredge materials. In 2001, the Contra Costa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, along with partners John Muir Land Trust and East Bay Regional Park District, purchased 122 acres at Pacheco Marsh. Over the following two decades, the flood district worked with wetland ecologists and other scientists to design a new tidal marsh on the landscape.
In 2020, Marathon Petroleum donated a 18.6-acre parcel to the John Muir Land Trust. By the end of 2021, the flood district had dug out a system of sloughs, sculpted elevations to encourage wetland health and accommodate rising sea levels, and planted 30,000 native plants. That October, the levee blocking connection to Suisun Bay was breached, reuniting the marsh with the tides. The tule, cattails, salt grass, and Pacific glasswort naturally populated the channel edges, while planted toyon, coyote brush, and California rose at higher elevations settled in, providing habitat for wildlife like the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.
The flood district deeded the land to John Muir Land Trust in 2023. The land trust prepared the site for public use and now serves as its steward. Pacheco Marsh marks the beginning of the land trust’s larger campaign to preserve and restore the Bay Delta.
As our canoe sails through the gateway, our vistas widen. Across Suisun Bay, several surplus military ships are barely visible. To the west, a large tanker threads its way between bridge piers of the Benicia-Martinez Bridge. A sea lion bellows from underneath a nearby pier, its ork–ork–ork echoing off the wooden pilings.
Calm water makes for an easy paddle to the mouth of Walnut Creek about 1,000 feet east of the gateway. With Mount Diablo on the horizon, we keep to the right and enter the creek where two white-tailed kites serve as sentinels on a dead tree.
Pacheco Marsh’s restoration is tied to the history of Walnut Creek. According to the San Francisco Estuary Institute, the creek and marsh were once part of a 5,000-acre historic wetland, where Walnut Creek ran free, strong, and deep enough for ships to navigate four miles inland to Pacheco.
But extensive cattle grazing, logging, and the takeover of shallow-rooted, nonnative grasses on the hillsides led to erosion. Then, in the 1860s, periods of relentless rain interrupted by a three-year drought scoured the hillsides. Sediments choked the creek, leading to floods.
Enter the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which in the 1960s widened and straightened Lower Walnut Creek and built levees to prevent flooding. But soon the creek filled with sediment again. “It was a perfect storm of blocking the flood control channel that the Corps designed,” says Sara Duckler, senior civil engineer for the flood district, explaining that sediments entered the creek downstream from the tides and upstream from runoff. In 1973, the Corps dredged over 850,000 cubic yards of sediment from the creek and scoured floodplain and spread it across the already degraded wetland habitat of Pacheco Marsh. The flood district continued to work with the Corps on a solution, but after years of inconsistent federal funding, the district wrested control of Lower Walnut Creek in 2014 through an act of Congress. The district developed the Lower Walnut Creek Restoration Project, of which Pacheco Marsh is a part.
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We turn the canoe’s nose into the first slough we come to and paddle into a network of engineered sloughs on the east side of Pacheco Marsh. With the tide still rising, we duck our heads to pass under a bridge and continue until the channel narrows, forcing us to turn around. Unfortunately, this network of sloughs is not connected to the main slough because the marsh is bisected by a berm that covers an outfall pipe carrying clean, treated wastewater.
On our way out of the marsh’s eastern flank, I notice a thicket of cattails, their drying blades rustling in the wind. I stop to pinch their brown flower heads and watch the seeds scatter in the wind. According to local wetland expert Phyllis Faber, cattails indicate that the water’s salinity is no higher than 2 percent.
Heading back, I spot two river otters sliding gracefully into Suisun Bay. We reach the boat launch and pull out the canoe without incident. The round trip was about three miles.
“[Pacheco Marsh can] be a showcase of what can be done when a team of people keep heading in the right direction to pursue a vision,” says Tim Jensen, the flood district’s assistant chief engineer. “A lot of good things happened . . . to make this project better than imagined.”
It’s also an ecological work of art. With its winged shade structures, educational signposts, sinuous sloughs, and elevated trails with flourishing native plants, Pacheco Marsh shows how a tidal marsh can heal—and thrive—even after a century of abuse.
We roll our canoe back to the parking lot as a distant train whistle blows, a great blue heron banks in the wind, and the tide turns.
Explore
Pacheco Marsh
- The draw: A restored salt marsh along the shore of Suisun Bay, home to countless birds and other wildlife and thousands of native plants.
- The trail: Two and a half miles of trails open to hikers and bikers (including a wheelchair-accessible trail), elevated vistas, interpretive panels, aluminum pedestrian bridges, and explorable routes for paddlers.
- Facilities: Restrooms and shaded benches are available near the parking lot.
- Getting there: 2501 Waterfront Road, Martinez 94553
- Read more about the restoration: A Ramble Around Pacheco Marsh, from May 2025.
