Just a mile and a half west of First Street lies an area unique in many ways - to the history of Benicia, the ecology of California and the state park system - all of which is little known to the citizens who walk its trails or drive past on 780 daily.
150,000 years ago the Golden Gate was a spectacular 900 foot-deep canyon, its steep sides soaring well above a varicose vein of rivers coursing from the Sierras. These waters raced through the Carquinez Canyon to the Pacific. Global warm spells regularly melted glacial ice and drowned them. As ocean waters rose past the Strait, some 20,000 years ago they pushed back and slowed the rivers, which began to drop their loads of silt and clay.
Midway in the Carquinez Canyon, an earthquake fault divided the Carquinez Heights to the north, creating a bay. Both bay and fault were named Southampton after the flagship of the US Navy that anchored there in 1849.
The Golden Gate and Carquinez Strait are now 300 and 80 feet deep respectively. Rushing tidal currents scour their narrow channels despite the bay mud, but the bays in the San Francisco area continually fill with river silt.
After gold was discovered in the Sierra, hydraulic mining sent silt coursing downriver to estuaries, marshes and bays until it was regulated in 1884. In 1849, Southampton Bay was 90 feet deep, enough to easily anchor the fleet. In the 160 next years, silt and clay runoff created a mudflat and marsh. Settlers added to the process by using wetlands for dumps both to get rid of garbage and to fill wetlands for development. The City of Benicia used the Southampton Bay near Benicia Road for a dump until the 1960s.
The constant tidal tug of war between salt and fresh waters creates a unique brackish area on the edge called an estuary, whose plants and animals filter the water and nurse aquatic young and migrating birds. Plants like algae absorb carbon monoxide and animals like mussels convert phosphorous, cleaning the waters and providing food.
Over thousands of years, Native Carquinez Indians harvested the tastiest morsels such as oysters, mussels and clams. Within 150 years, the Bay Area lost 30 percent of its wetlands, from silting and landfilling for new home sites.
Fortunately, Benicia Councilor James Lemos, Mayor Mike Fitzgerald and City Attorney John Bohn lobbied the state government to preserve what was left of Southampton Bay, which by the 1950s was so choked with silt that on some maps it is called a Cove.
According to John Crossman, Superintendent of Public Safety for the Diablo Vista District State Parks system, the state began acquiring tide land and tax delinquent property on the Dillon peninsula in 1955, calling it Benicia Beach State Park. The Benicia State Recreation Area opened in 1967.
"There are state parks and reserves, historical parks and beaches," Crossman said, "a state recreation area is an older designation and there aren't that many of them."
When opened, the BSRA had 447 dry acres, or 720 with the wetlands, stretching from the rocky shore of Dillon Point favored by fishers both feathered and not to the hills toward Vallejo, past the restless Carquinez Strait, the placid Southampton Bay and its marsh and on past the mudflats along the freeway. In 1969, the 1887 San Francisco railroad ferry Encinal, which had housed the popular Spenger's Fish Grotto off K Street since 1942, was burned along with pioneer Patrick Dillon's 1852 stone and wood ranch house.
"We might have preserved it today," said Crossman, "the parks are becoming more sensitive to local values."
They were sensitive enough in 1967 to include within the BSRA the Southampton Bay Natural Preserve, which protects the sensitive marsh and its rare and endangered residents. That makes the BSRA unusual among the state's 278 parks, reserves, beaches, historic and recreation areas.
Development has included moving the 1.2 mile Marsh Trail in 1995. It was named one of the Bay Area's Best Hikes for Children in 2002. The bike trail that follows the old World War II landing strip along 780 offers exercise stations along its .75 mile length and several loop trails into the mudflats among the pickleweed and fennel along the edge of the shoreline. These two were followed by the handicapped-assessable, 2.2 mile Benicia Bay Trail over the hills to Vallejo in 2003. It is uniquely part of both the Bay Area Ridge Trail and Bay Trail systems. In 2004, the Forrest Deaner Native Plant Botanic Garden was opened in the picnic area, another unique project as a joint effort of the Native Plant Society and the State Parks.
BSRA is one of just 33 state recreation areas, attracting 25,000 users a year. The Benicia State Capitol, one of 51 California Historic Parks, welcomes 7,000 visitors. As well as containing several endangered species including the clapper rail, the bird which inspired the phrase "skinny as a rail" when looked at head on, the BSRA protects rare plants like the soft bird's beak, said associate state ecologist Cyndy Shafer.
"Loss of wetlands means losing their incredible ability to filter toxins from the water and the nurseries that nurture young species, their buffer from high water and waves and their biological diversity," she said.
An oiled scoter washed up at the park recently, unable to fly well. None of the oil reached the marsh so it must have come from San Francisco Bay, she said, but it shows the fragility of the system. It was saved by the Cordelia wildlife center.
"It doesn't take much to make them sick," said Shafer, whose favorite spot is watching the raptors hunt along Dillon Point.
The first protected area in California was Yosemite, thanks to John Muir, but it wasn't the first state park, Crossman said, because the federal government took it over before state parks existed. Big Basin, home of old growth redwoods south of Los Gatos, was California's first park in 1902.
With two state protected areas within two miles of each other, the only ones in Solano County, Benicia is fortunate to be part of the system that preserves the past for future generations, and one which Benicians and others appreciate every day.
"I am glad the local community supports the Benicia State Recreation Area so much," Shafer said, "They really use it."
And they've been supporting it for 40 years, beginning with its creation.
Originally published in the January 2008 edition of
Inside Benicia. Used with kind permission.