By Melanie Hess, Bay Nature
Islais 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 five-story copra crane, warehouses and a heavy metal drawbridge that hardly ever has a 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.
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, which leads the Water Trail project.
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