I led a stroll across the headwaters of Lion Creek this weekend, visiting the Lincoln Sq. serpentine and landslide, the Alma Mine and Crusher Quarry websites, and the Hayward fault over at thirty ninth Avenue (one of many seven stations). Among the best components of the journey was revisiting the creek at McCrea Memorial Park and Oakland’s casting swimming pools, an unsung civic amenity for our fly-fishing inhabitants.
The casting swimming pools had been constructed within the late Nineteen Fifties. The land was a part of town’s Leona Park, which prolonged from right here throughout Mountain Boulevard and up Horseshoe Creek. To all appearances, this web site was a pure floodplain on the time, naked of vegetation. They did a wonderful job, and a fringe of timber was planted across the swimming pools that quickly supplied the ambiance of seclusion that also prevails. The subsequent stage of growing the realm was to construct a set of ponds downstream the place you can fish for precise trout, not simply follow flycasting.
The trout ponds had been a metropolis concession, managed by a caretaker from the little home throughout the creek. Barratt Wells, a Piedmont native who additionally operated a trout pond in Tilden Park, was awarded the ten-year contract in 1959, however he died in 1963.
There have been three ponds, stocked with trout annually. The Oakland Tribune reported, “One pond comprises fish from six inches up and is to be used by kids over 5 and non-expert adults. A second pond is for toddlers below 5, whereas the third, with a very pure setting, is for the specialists, who will fish for trout as much as three kilos.” You paid for what you caught.
When the route 13 freeway was pushed by within the Nineteen Sixties, it break up the park into two items, Leona Heights Park on the east and this half, named George E. McCrea Memorial Park in 1962, on the west. An obscure pedestrian overcrossing connecting the 2 parcels is the route we took.
(George McCrea owned this land, and his son gave it to town. He additionally owned a historic little bit of land farther north by Holy Names School, the place he had a home. Extra about that in a bit.)
The fishing program ended round 1975, and the ponds quickly stuffed with silt. Police volunteers mucked them out in the summertime of 1981, and the state provided the park with trout. The police affiliation ran in style fishing periods for teenagers there each summer season by at the very least 2009.
The 1960-era design was fairly good at becoming three working ponds within the slender area obtainable. Right here’s the way it regarded within the spring of 2014, the primary time I got here right here.
To begin with, every little thing is concrete, even the creek mattress itself working alongside the appropriate aspect. The wall within the entrance has two cutouts, the massive one on the appropriate and a bit one on the left. Timbers and metal plates are inserted over these gaps to manage the stream by them, and the area within the entrance is the primary trout pond. The second pond is simply previous the redwood tree (which was planted ca. 1960) and the third one, a lot bigger, is behind it. Right here’s one other view that reveals the little cutout higher.
All of it seems to be tidy in these views, however the ponds held stagnant, weedy water on the time and a pair of geese.
This weekend, 9 years later, the bottom pond regarded like this (view upstream).
Good sufficient. Peaceable. However no good for trout. And right here’s the uphill aspect once more. The center pond isn’t even a pond any extra.
I had so forgotten the center pond that I used to be enthusing to the group in regards to the pretty wetland being watered with this ingenious system. I remorse the error. And within the entrance you possibly can see that the primary pond is filling up with sediment too, to not point out the creek mattress behind it.
Lion Creek will not be a serious watercourse, but you possibly can see how dynamic streambeds are. To construct and preserve a park in a single is an costly, ongoing undertaking, and I feel town ought to take into account how you can let this picturesque ruin-in-the-making discover its manner again to a state that’s simpler to handle. The casting swimming pools can be okay for a few years to come back.
Again to George McCrae. His wind up by Holy Names was the Ohlones’ previous ocher mine, and the chair-sized boulders positioned across the trout ponds look to be the identical stuff. They don’t look the identical as a result of they’ve acquired a shaggy coat of lichens within the moist surroundings, however they’re vivid pink inside. Admire them too if you go to.
A last deal with in McCrea Park is up close to the doorway.
These sandstone blocks are items of Oakland’s first highschool, inbuilt 1871. I’ve documented them on Lakeshore Avenue and close to Lake Merritt, and it’s all the time a pleasure to seek out them.
