RON HENGGELER

A September sunrise from my window

 

The morning glory-covered tower in the front yard with the sunlight reflecting off a mirror.

The Pulgas Water Temple is a stone structure west of I-280 at 86 Cañada Road Woodside California.

The Pulgas Water Temple was built in 1934 to celebrate the completion of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and aqueduct across the California Central Valley to Crystal Springs Reservoir.

 

 

 

The Pulgas Water Temple was designed by architect William G. Merchant.

It was erected by the San Francisco Water Department to commemorate the 1934 completion of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct and is located at the aqueduct's terminus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

San Francisco built the Pulgas Water Temple as a monument to the engineering marvel that brought Hetch Hetchy water more than 160 miles across California from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Bay Area. The Hetch Hetchy Project took 24 years to build through the Great Depression at a cost of $102 million.

The water temple consists of fluted columns arranged in a circle, upon which a large stone masonry ring with the words "I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people " are inscribed.

(from Isaiah 43:20)

 

On October 28, 1934, the roar of Hetch Hetchy mountain water greeted everyone gathered at Pulgas Water Temple to celebrate its arrival. With vivid memories of the fire that had raged unchecked after the Great Earthquake of 1906, the city rejoiced in its new secure, plentiful supply of high quality drinking water. The frieze above the columns expresses the city’s joyful relief: “I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people.”

Pulgas Water Temple was designed in the Beaux Arts style by William Merchant, a San Francisco architect trained by Bernard Maybeck. Merchant’s design featured fluted columns and Corinthian capitals to reflect the architecture of ancient Greeks and Romans, whose engineering methods were used to build the new water system. Artist and master stone carver Albert Bernasconi brought Merchant’s drawings to life.

Pulgas Water Temple is located about one-half mile south of the Cañada Road trailhead. To get there, take Interstate 280 to the Edgewood Road exit. Proceed west on Edgewood Road to Cañada Road, then north on Cañada Road approximately two miles to the temple.

Pulgas Water Temple and its parking lot are open to the public on weekdays, Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

http://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=93

San Francisco and surrounding communities get water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir approximately 160 miles away via the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct. Water once made the journey to the Pulgas Water Temple and flowed over a small C-shaped waterfall within the water temple itself where it continued approximately 800 feet down a canal to the west into Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir.

The Pulgas Water Temple appears on the side of a Water Department Truck

Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve is located on the western slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Half Moon Bay. The centerpiece of this 4,711-acre Preserve is Purisima Creek Canyon, with its towering redwoods, rushing creek, and understory of ferns, berries, and wildflowers. Magnificent views of the coast and Half Moon Bay are visible from the northern part of the preserve.

Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Albert Einstein

Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

Empedocles

A view of the far-distant Mt Tamalpais as seen from Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve

 

Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

Hans Christian Andersen

 

 

Coast Redwoods - Redwoods are one of the oldest trees in the world. When dinosaurs roamed the earth, redwoods were the dominate trees in the Northern hemisphere. Today, coast redwoods are only found along the coast in a narrow band stretching from southern Oregon to just south of Monterey. Coast redwoods are the tallest trees in the world, growing up to 360 feet tall (36 stories). The oldest known age of a redwood is 2,200 years, although the average mature age is 500 to 1,000 year old. The trees seen here at Purisima Creek Redwoods Preserve are probably about 100 years old. They make up what is called a second-growth forest. The original redwood forest was logged in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The largest redwoods were probably close to 1,000 years old when they were cut, with diameters between 10 and 20 feet. The large stumps along the Purisima Creek Trail are evidence of these trees.

 

 

 

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

William Shakespeare

Although this very popular park is just across the street from the many preserves outside Woodside and Palo Alto, Purisima Creek feels completely different — the woods are lusher and a lot more attractive, the open hilltops have dramatic vistas of bald coastal hills and redwood-filled canyons below, and the park seems more wild and expansive.

 

 

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.
Michelangelo

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Galileo Galilei

 

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Rabindranath Tagore

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Walt Whitman

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Helen Keller

The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.

Ruth Bernhard

 

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

William Blake

 

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
John Muir

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Luigi Pirandello

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

Edward Steichen

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

William Shakespeare

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

George Washington Carver

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

Alice Walker

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

e. e. cummings

 

 

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.

Annie Leibovitz

 

 

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

John Burroughs

 

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Arthur C. Clarke

 

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

Paul Cezanne

 

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

John Muir

 

 

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

John Keats

 

 

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Vincent Van Gogh

Snowy Plovers on Dunes Beach

The good man is the friend of all living things.
Mahatma Gandhi

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Aristotle

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.

Anne Frank

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

Lord Byron

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Vincent Van Gogh

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

George Washington Carver