Clearly, the stingray is the star of this video, as it should be. The cruel, matter-of-fact way that the fisherman handles it doesn't seem to lessen its sinister awesomeness.

Perhaps it's a good symbol for this whole area of San Francisco.

This video covers Candlestick Point, Yosemite Slough, South Basin, and India Basin. Stay tuned as we explore the entirety of San Francisco's coastal edges in an ongoing series of vids.

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"Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it." --Lao Tzu

There's something about San Francisco's bodies of water that people just can't resist. We abuse them, we bury them, we fill them in with rubble and toxins - and then finally when we realize the error of our ways, if we're lucky we can pull them back from the brink.

Consider Yosemite Creek, a small but crucial part of the city's watershed. The creek's entire trip, from McLaren Park to Bayview, takes place in aging underground pipes. But it may not always be that way: the Public Utilities Commission is exploring nifty new ways to "daylight" the creek, ranging from creating new parks to placing watery channels alongside city streets.

The Marsh

Poor McLaren Park. It has a name, but sometimes it seems to lack an identity. Way out in the Excelsior - or is it Portola? - it boasts a head-spinning array of amenities: tennis and basketball courts, a pool, dog run areas galore, barbecue pits and an amphitheater, woodsy trails, and possibly soon a disc-golf course.

But among the Park's distinguishing features, a spot called Yosemite Marsh may be the most unique. Unlike two nearby asphalt-contained bodies of water - one a reservoir, the other McNab Lake - Yosemite Marsh is a naturally-occurring wetland.

You could be forgiven for walking right by without noticing it. It's small, and hidden by a thicket of trees. A wooden footbridge crosses through the thicket, spanning a thin gully. Nearby, and for no discernable reason, a concrete sculpture of a dolphin sits across from an always-empty park bench.

At this time of year, the creek is nearly completely dry; but during the rainy season, a steady stream of water emerges from the hillside to feed the marsh. The marsh, in turn, provides habitat to herons, quail, ducks, bullfrogs, lizards, and (thrillingly) wrentits.

Formerly a bit run-down, the Marsh enjoyed an extreme makeover in 2006 [PDF]. The most prominent upgrades are a nice footpath and seating, but there are more infrastructural improvements under the hood: erosion control, enlarged banks, and enhanced wetland plantings, thanks to a $150,000 grant and $150,000 in Rec & Park Department Funds. With riparian rehab projects such as this, it can take five to ten years for plants to mature; the hillside above the marsh still looks a bit scraggly, but you can definitely see where it's growing in.

Hal Phillips put together this very "electric" edit of footage we shot recently at the marsh:

There's still lots of work to be done elsewhere in the park. McLaren is currently in the running for a $30,000 grant from Sears (yes, Sears) to improve a particularly unkempt northern entrance to the park.

Of course, the marsh isn't the only moisture in the area. Various trickles of water can be found throughout the park. (And in fact, I carelessly stepped into one up to my ankle when I visited after a rainstorm.) Why is McLaren so wet? Bedrock. Soil is slow to discharge moisture, so water tends to hang around a bit.

And when the water finally does trickle out of the park, it has quite a trip ahead of it. From McLaren, it winds its way underground past University Mound Reservoir under Portola and the Phillip Burton Academic School, under the 101 and the 3rd Street light rail, and then finally aligning itself with Yosemite Ave - its namesake - before emptying into the South Basin in an area known as Yosemite Slough.

The Slough

The most complicated step in Yosemite Creek's journey lies at the very end, in Yosemite Slough. It's a highly sensitive ecological area, decimated by decades of heavy industry. But there's reason for hope: a massive environmental restoration is underway [PDF], featuring the planting of thousands of native species, soil remediation, and habitat construction.

But it is only hope at this point. As the video below shows, the area is currently an industrial dumping area. (The song is "33" by David Molina's Ghosts and Strings.)

It's not exactly an easy spot to access, and lord knows it's toxic in several different ways; we've done the exploring so you don't have to.

The Slough is part of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, which in general is well worth a visit. Don't let the unseemly history scare you off. Yes, legend has it that it got its name because of all the burning abandoned ships nearby. And yes, for years it was used as a landfill. Okay, and the Navy didn't exactly take great care of it during WWII.

But! You can't beat that view. And apparently the birds agree: there's no better place in San Francisco for spotting herons, loons, egrets, and avocet than nearby Heron's Head Park. Environmental cleanup - much of it led by students - is gradually turning the area from a garbade dump to prime real estate.

With Yosemite Marsh stronger than ever, Yosemite Slough on the mend, and Yosemite Creek facing a new lease on life, there's never been a better time to thank San Francisco's watershed for sticking with us through thick and thin.

Matt Baume is a San Francisco writer and photographer covering transit, ecology, and the science of cities.

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The SF Public Utilities Commission just tweeted that another water main has broken, this time near Crescent Ave. and Banks Street.

This on the heels of a sinkhole South of Market, which was just repaired yesterday but which caused brown water to flow from the taps of nearby residents.

I'm not gonna go on too much here, but just allow me a friendly reminder...

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Make no mistake: Artist and self-styled "greenbelt steward" Amber Hasselbring, pictured above (pointing) along with her field-guide-clutching partner in crime (and fellow artist), Iris Clearwater, is just as enthusiastic inspecting manhole covers like the one next to her, as she is identifying a native butterfly or monkey flower. More after the jump...

That's because San Francisco's combined sewer system provides a veiled link to the natural past of the city, the sound of rushing water beneath reminding those who stop, bend over, and listen, that a network of creeks and wetlands once defined the landscape before The Octopus had its way.

The land is different now, forever changed and changing, and although the dance between industry, human habitation, and ecological health is a ridiculously complex one, Amber and Iris represent a robust movement in SF to restore native habitats wherever possible.

The principle is that - even if these individual natural areas are temporary, one day to be reclaimed for development - fostering the growth of species which relate to one another in a sustainable way can help all species, including humans, best use the land we share. The idealism is infectious, even for a cranky old coot like your author.

During a guided walk on behalf of Nature in the City that went from Noe Valley up to Twin Peaks, conversation ranged from bees to butterflies to birds and beyond. But it also covered issues like sidewalk gardens, homelessness, and the collection of citizen and government organizations that make up a diverse ecosystem of their own.

The spot shown above, under Market Street at 24th Street, is being stewarded by Amber as part of a personal effort to do what she can, through planting, monitoring, and interfacing with neighborhood residents, to restore native habitat. It's near one of the historical sources of what was Precita Creek, a tributary of Islais Creek. (The water running under 24th Street and through Noe Valley is the city's diversion of that native waterway.)

Here, it has reached daylight again, if only in trickle form:

We can't really say this is the Precita Creek, since pavement and backyards uphill have changed the rates and locations of water absorption that help supply the water for this stream. The place where that water now emerges as a spring likely does not correspond to the historical spring.

But, it's the Precita Creek we have now. It's modest, and delicate, but it's there, and if Amber and Iris and lots of folks like her have their way, it will get stronger, more sustainable, and will continue to contribute to biodiversity here in San Francisco.

Iris leans in for a closer look at a garden just uphill from Precita Creek.

Red Admiral.

I try to avoid postcard shots, but come on, who could resist this view from Twin Peaks? Answer: Nobody!

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If you think the streets are bad after today's downpour, you should see what's going on underneath the streets.

San Francisco has an antiquated sewer system, but with a "green" twist. It's the only community in California that operates a predominantly "combined" system, which means our wastewater and our stormwater flow through the same pipes to the ocean/Bay. More after the jump...

During storms, of course, there's a sudden surge in flow, which means the North Point Wet Weather Facility fires up to deal with flows from the northeastern section of the city. In one hour, the operators can increase the flow rate from zero to 150 million gallons per day. Is that enough?

And is that the only part of the city that needs the extra capacity? You decide:

When older cities installed combined systems, it was before there was such a thing as water treatment. They'd just route all waste and stormwater into the nearest, largest body of water. Once water treatment was developed, most cities decided to bracket out the water from storms, and build a separate drainage for wastewater in order to lessen the amount of treatment needed.

In San Francisco, this was deemed a bad solution because of the excessive cost and disruption of ripping up every street to install all the new tunnels. So we said screw it and kept the combined system, choosing eventually to treat all of the water, stormwater included. Most combined systems operate in a way that just shuffles any overflow in the system straight to the drainage destination, including wastewater! Kind of like this:

Not ours. We treat it all. (Filthy Canadians.)

This turns out to be smart environmentally, because stormwater is highly polluted since it basically washes loose all the accrued leavings we deposit on paved surfaces. So the Bay and the Pacific Ocean are cleaner than if we had a separated system. All our water gets treated before it's dumped, and we only swim in our own feces on days like today when the system backs up entirely - yay us!

Additionally, we've now begun to mimic natural watershed processes by redirecting some of the runoff to vegetated areas which reduce, filter, and slow stormwater runoff, lessening the burden on the combined sewer system.

Maybe the city should pick up the pace on that last initiative. Obama? Stimulus? Nevermind.

UPDATE: The SF Sewers Blog (yes there is such a thing!) points out that over $150 million has been spent on SF's sewers over the past 5 years.

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Fed by the same aquifer, but not directly connected, these bodies of water are special parts of the San Francisco watershed near the Presidio.

More after the jump...

Lobos Creek (pictured above and below) supplies almost half of the Presidio's water supply, and is also one of the last traces of the free-flowing creeks that used to criss-cross San Francisco.

The banks of the creek are only accessible by jumping a fence along the "Lobos Creek Trail" (a dumb name because you can barely see the creek from the boardwalk) inside the Presidio.

UPDATE: Some super cool footage in this video (the Ansel Adams stuff is a little blah):

Mountain Lake is one of only four natural lakes in the city, and is where Juan Bautista de Anza first pitched camp before claiming the land for Spain. It's only about 60% of its former size after being filled in partially, but there's a charming little park around it that was designed by William Hammond Hall, the same dude who designed Golden Gate Park.

Mountain Lake Park

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UPDATE 4/14/2010: Via Matt Baume, from StreetsBlog:

The PUC ... proposes to terminate the creek in a manufactured wetland at the western end of Islais Creek Channel. The area is currently an asphalt lot just down the street from the headquarters of Mythbusters, used occasionally to store vehicles.

This would be a fantastic and appropriate honor for this spot. (And there is still more than just asphalt here!)

Once upon a time in 2001, there was a tiny plot of shoreline, Muwekma Ohlone Park and Wildlife Sanctuary, named after the native people who once populated the San Francisco peninsula. Guerrilla gardeners had, for years, nurtured this vestige of unlikely marshland amidst the industrial zone near Hunters Point.

More after the jump...

It became home to a cute, singing frog; some birds; and was an outdoor classroom for local children to learn a lesson about the original state of our land (and the hideous invulnerability of "The Octopus").

And then, on Thanksgiving Day of that same year, MUNI busted a sewer main, flooding the park with shit. They brought out the bulldozers and covered it up, destroying a third of the small plot.

In 2005, MUNI struck again, this time trying to burrow under the channel for the sake of its T-Third Street expansion of mayhem, and turned what remained of the "pocket park" back into a turd puddle.

Again, the bulldozers. Again, loss of habitat.

Four years later, the T-Third line is up and running and the Muwekma pocket park is long gone. What does the spot look like now?

As of October 4th, 2009, it's clear that there is still an impressive act of nature happening here. Remnants of marsh remain, enough that I saw birds hunting for fish, and you can clearly see in the above shot that vegetation, including pickle weed and myrtle, refuses to yield to the pollution.

Suck it, bulldozers.

The site is presently inaccessible to the public, and can only be reached by hopping the guard rail of the Illinois Street bridge and climbing down the industrial fence. (It can be a bitch getting back up.) It looks like it's currently used by skaters or junkies, or skater junkies.

Rock-n-Roll.

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