12/11/14 - Major Storm, Creek Flooding

Twitter- More continuous updates, a few more pictures.
Flickr - More vibrant pictures of trash as well as some highlights of wildlife in the neighborhood and Bay.

So I thought I would be able to get to at least some of that stuff (shopping carts, strollers, etc.) at some point in the near future, but I was gravely wrong, not mistaken, but wrong. As far as I am aware, all that stuff from three days ago is currently making it's way into Nature's Landfill, otherwise known as large bodies of water like the SF Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

A very big rainstorm made it to Silicon Valley (Yay! Some rain!) and promptly flooded all the creeks and waterways. It was raining heavily, and I happened to have a car today, so  thought I'd check out a few other parts of the creek.

 Here is the view from Monroe, facing south, toward the train tracks. Lots of water; sadly, all of this is just dumping to the bay instead of filling up reservoirs or wells.

 Here is El Camino Real facing north.

And El Camino Real Facing south.

 Lastly, I headed down to Pruneridge at Maywood Park, where I found a nice big pile of trash including a Little-Tykes style tricycle, not too unlike the tractor I pulled out. You may not be able to see it with the resolution of the photo posted, but that middle bucket has a high heel shoe and two spray cans plainly visible, and who knows what lies beneath.

On second thought, why don't I just crop it and give you the closeup. Hollow plastic tricycle and cans of spray paint. Are dumpings like these the source of all that miserable trash and hazardous waste that I came across one of my first few weeks of this blog?

Or

Did some very nice person or group of people trudge through this creek one day and bag all of this stuff up? Maybe a lot of this showed up from the flood just a few days ago like all the trash did in my neighborhood. Only, perhaps these people were much wiser, watched the weather report, and saw an even bigger storm was coming which would surely carry all of this to the bay.

If this latter possibility is indeed the case, I wish I could contact these people and thank them.

Here's the water coming from the south.

Here it's rushing under a bridge on Pruneridge.

And here it's heading toward the bay. Thankfully that trash is on the side and not in the creek.

And here's Maywood Park. I've never been here before, but it's quite pretty.

So there you have it, a heavy day of rain (still raining hard during picture taking) has finally come to drought-stricken California. However, it creates the ever-powerful litter freight-train constantly moving anything and everything in the waterways downstream to the bay. Unfortunately, I missed my chance to help and pull the carts and strollers out. Fortunately, it looks like someone else took the time and created a big heap of trash that is not going to the bay.

12/5/14 - Pac12 Oregon Vs. Arizona; Also, Post-Flooding

Twitter- More continuous updates, a few more pictures.
Flickr - More vibrant pictures of trash as well as some highlights of wildlife in the neighborhood and Bay.

So, here we are, two days after the creek flooded, without having seen much litter during the flooding. This is the Friday evening of the Pac12 Oregon Vs. Arizona game. Evening always makes things look pretty.

 So does a nice partly cloudy morning.

The creek looks good, the sun is shining, what lies ahead?

Here's a tire under the three bridges that must have been dragged downstream from the creek flooding.

Here's another different tire, also dragged down from somewhere upstream. If anyone has any insights as to what might be bubbling up between the two coots, I would love to know - could it be a turtle, or did I just happen to witness an air pocket in the sediment burst?

 The egret and his coot buddies enjoying the morning.

The creek doesn't look that bad, the sky is so pretty after all.

Looking closer at the ground and not the sky, we find trash, including a spray can, something that really bugs me.

A baby stroller? How on earth do these things make it into the creek in the first place?

A shopping cart as well, in very good condition.

Another, different store's shopping cart, also in seemingly good condition.

A third new tire.

A folding street sign of sorts.

An egret getting away from all this litter.

The heron, however, enjoys the company of a nice orange traffic cone.

A fourth tire.

And lastly, a second different model baby stroller that looks like it got buried pretty well.

Here's again the transition from natural reek to concrete lined - this is what it normally looks like with much less water.

So, sadly, I had a mad scramble at work, so I wasn't able to spend the two or so hours it would take to pull each and every one of these items out, so I figured I would pull them out the following week or over the weekend. These pictures are on a Monday (12/8/14), and I thought I could probably get them on Saturday.

But back to the more pressing issue, how do four tires, two shopping carts, and two baby strollers make it into a creek? I don't know, yet, but I hope to find out.

12/3/14 - 49ers Vs. Redskins Vs. Seahawks Vs. Flooding

I didn't have a chance to get in between the two games, and after the Seahawks we got some much needed rain. That means exciting creek flooding. Fortunately, it wasn't completely depressing like one of my first posts.

It gets pretty high since this creek is one of the four main thoroughfares for flood control of Silicon Valley, at least as far as I am aware. Going from east to west, there's: Coyote Creek, Guadalupe River / Alviso Slough, San Tomas Aquino Creek (this one) / Guadalupe Slough, and Stevens Creek.

Some days the creek floods the bike path, sometimes making things more difficult, and sometimes it's so deep it's impassable. Usually, the city closes off the bike path when the water gets dangerously high on the bike path.

Now here's where a lot of the litter collects from game traffic due to wind, etc. As mentioned prior, the wind blows the litter down the slope closer to the water over time, and now the water rose to meet it and take it to its final destination, whether that's the Bay or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Here's the same location looking back on the stadium. I will probably find that basketball on my next trip out to the bay.

Here's the underpass under highway 101. It's about 2' deep today here, enough to warrant pedaling through in a pretty low gear.

Here's the transition upstream from mostly natural waterway to concrete lined waterway.

So, very little litter seen floating by, which is nice to see, but also probably a whole lot washed away litter from the creek banks.

11/2/14 - 49ers Versus Rams

Twitter- More continuous updates, a few more pictures.
Flickr - More vibrant pictures of trash as well as some highlights of wildlife in the neighborhood and Bay.

 This post is nice and short, the Monday after the 49ers Vs. Rams game on 11/02/14.

There's a bit of litter on the side of the creek, but I think most of it is residual.

 Unfortunately and time passes, it makes its way further toward the water.

 And then even further.

This is most likely from a football player wannabe, found a bit upstream from the stadium, a large tub of whey isolate protein powder, almost but really not quite as tasty as cottage cheese, or yogurt, or regular cheese, or a glass of milk.

10/24-10/26 - Cal Versus Oregon and a South Bay Tractor Pull

Twitter- More continuous updates, a few more pictures.
Flickr - More vibrant pictures of trash as well as some highlights of wildlife in the neighborhood and Bay.

It has been a while since my last post for a number of reasons.

1. Life got a little busy to keep this blog current.
2. I was mightily de-motivated by someone I know.

However, I have been taking pictures along the way since that doesn't take very much time compared to blog posts. I am also motivated again to keep this going because:

1. Levi's Stadium did a pretty good job all in all during the football season of keeping litter at bay.
2. Levi's Stadium has gotten a little messy during some off-season events.
3. The creek and the bay to which it connects has lots of really neat wildlife to see.

Without further ado, this is the weekend of the Cal Vs. Oregon football game. This post is a bit long, because I haven't learned the brain photo filter technique, yet. The subsequent posts will also likely be as long. I suppose it is a photo-blog after all.

Here is the stadium before the game.

As you can see, the creek isn't spotless here, so that will have to be accounted for after the game.

More litter, but lets take a closer look at it:

This isn't Levi's litter, this is Great America's Halloween Show litter. It's disappointing that Great America, whose entrance is much further away from the creek than the stadium's entrances, still trek's trash to the creek. Now we have to wonder how many amusement park attendees are to blame for creek litter.

Here's Cal's big rig pulling into the back of the stadium an hour before kick-off.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the stadium is fully equipped with garbage cans - note the three flavors: Landfill, Recycle, and Compost. That's 50% more flavors of garbage than most places these days, which on the scale of the stadium means quite a bit more people-power to maintain.

Here the fans are trickling in. Surprising (me) or not (probably everyone else), there were a lot more Duck's fans than Bears fans even though Berkeley is an hour away and Oregon is a bit further.

Here's the parking lot that evening, perhaps a little dramatized with a polarizer and HDR (at least it's a single exposure).

The stadium:

The stadium the next day:

Continuing up the road, this is where the San Tomas Aquino Creek bends back south and heads east towards Sunnyvale, where it becomes the Guadalupe Slough.

Here are some ponds next to the creeks and sloughs, slowly becoming restored to marshlands after decades of being dehydrated sea-water.

Here's a mixed feeling notice: "Do not enter, or else you will disturb the owls that are burrowing in our landfill." 

There was a recent rain, so the snails were out in full force, most of which were bleached from a summer hibernation perched on some sun blasted reeds.

Some more non-stadium litter.

And more litter - it looks old, but it probably  takes about one decent rain to saturate these things in sediment.

In case you were wondering the location of the above litter, it's under Great America Parkway - I haven't taken and posted pictures of here before.

Paint cans - these things really bug me.

Here's a drain pipe from the street catching some of the litter.

A black-crowned night heron enjoying a rest on some trash.

A crow on the gravel near the stadium bridges.

These things also a pretty bad, the good ole' strangle small animals with debris trick.

More debris under the bridges, again, likely from residents of the city and not visitors to the stadium.

Coots and trash.

Here is a picture of the trash after the game, and there's less than prior to the game. Yay!

It's a really pretty creek from a high level.

 But take a close look one day and you'll see this:

Take a close look another day and you'll see this:

 Take an even closer look under the bridge and you'll see the bridge is an effective debris barrier.

So, also that weekend, on Sunday, I took the boat out to see if I could find that toy tractor again in the Guadalupe Slough which means:

1. Go out just shy of peak high tide in the area to make sure you have plenty of time to get up Alviso Slough, cross over the Bay, and go down Guadalupe Slough, and still have some time to try and wrangle the tractor without getting stuck.
2. Make sure all your equipment is in order, i.e. backup motor, marine radio, life vest, warm clothing, camera gear, GPS/Charts/depth finder. Some form of everything listed except the camera gear is recommended for a south bay outing.
3. Always wear your life vest - good ones are pretty comfy and there is honestly no reason not to.
4. Tether yourself to the engine kill-switch if your boat has one in the event you fall out at high speed the boat won't keep going without you.
5. Let someone know where you're going, what the tide schedule is, and when you should probably be back - nearly every other time I go out to the Alviso park without the boat for a hike, the fire trucks are there because someone got stuck at low tide or their engine died. The firefighters usually have to go out instead of having the boater wait for high tide due to the risk of exposure.

That was a lot of to-do's, but this was a particularly adventurous trip.

Some great blue herons are out. Unfortunately, I think I startled this one even though I kept my distance.

So here is a truncation of the tractor pull. The sloughs being much more sheltered and a bit deeper, are much calmer than the open bay.

If you notice, I exit the Guadalupe Slough, and head pretty close to north straight for the channel marker, and then make a hard right to go back to Alviso Slough. If I didn't go to the marker and instead went straight across from one slough exit to the next, I would be going over water that's 2-3' deep at best on high tides. I know because I got off of the channel once and the depth finder said 1.8'. I stuck an oar in and sure enough it got gooey mud on it about two feet in. Fortunately, the boat draws about 10", and the motor another 16" - it was churning up some mud, so raising the prop a little helped.

FYI, the depth finder is mounted about 8" under the water and is not calibrated for those 8", so it's like a bonus 8" of depth. I was constantly monitoring the depth finder while up against the reeds where the tractor was. The back of the boat had about 6' of water under it, so I felt comfortable enough to do what I did.

 This the firefighter's new rig. Their current rigs are some 2-3 person inflatables they carry in the back of their heavy equipment trailer. This boat isn't operational yet, for it's still being equipped and going through testing. I imagine they'll have radar on it eventually, and maybe a kicker motor.

 Yay, I got it! Wait! Did I miss a wheel? Dang it! Only when I looked at the footage later did I notice the wheel was sitting there in the marshes. However, I wasn't in the mood to stay up against the reeds after fishing the tractor out, so I got out of there as quickly as I could once I got it. I will have to try and get it again some other day. (Exaggerated blue sky is mostly the polarizer.)

Back on shore, here's the UC Davis Fisheries Research vessel. They come out and monitor the quantity and variety of aquatic life. This, as far as I remember them saying, is helpful in determining how well restored the wetlands are, for the birds and other animals depend on this fish food chain. Last time I saw them, they caught some aquarium fish the species of which I don't remember, using a dragnet across the slough.

Somebody else thinking the same thing - if you look closely, you'll see a pair of kayakers in the middle. If I remember correctly this is a Sloughkeepers operation this day. There are a number of individuals who go out in kayaks and pull trash out of the bay. The Sloughkeepers are typically the ones you see going upstream as opposed to going out to the bay.

So there you have it, Cal Vs. Oregon and a tractor pull in the Bay. The stadium litter is pretty decent, and I'd say it was cleaner after the event than before possibly because the stadium staff cleaned up the litter from the Great America attendees.

There are at least 12 more posts in the back log, so stay tuned. I have also done a bit more research on the waterway management projects of the city, county, state, and US agencies, so also stay tuned for that.