RON HENGGELER

May 13, 2007
Land Ho!

“San Francisco owes its fabled beauty to nature more than any other source. Hills, fog, and water define the city. But nature, of course, both acts upon San Francisco and is acted upon by it.

Virtually none of the landscape is as it was when the Ohlone lived off the land: even the city's forests were imported, to make the environment appear gentler and more like places that settlers had left behind.
But as we are reminded every time the earth quakes, nature is not gentle, and the changes wrought by natural forces dwarf any that humans have made on the terrain. Take San Francisco Bay. Twenty-five thousand years ago, before the end of the last Ice Age, it wasn’t a bay at all, but a valley carved out by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Their currents flowed through the Golden Gate and clear out to today’s Farallon Islands before joining the ocean. That ocean created and carried the sand upon which San Francisco is built---sand in drifts so deep that today’s Richmond and Sunset districts may well lie over buried rock peaks. The glaciers melted; water filled the valley and made a bay, and on that bay floated Spanish boats towards what would one day be San Francisco. “ THE GREAT SAN FRANCISCO Trivia & Fact Book by Janet Bailey

 

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