Allison Walks…Lake Merced
Click through the slideshow to see Allison’s walk around Lake Merced.
Welcome to the Lake
Here’s a little trivia about Lake Merced brought to you by the Western Neighborhoods Project: Lake Merced was originally inhabited by the Ohlone Indians, who fished the lake and plied the nearby Pacific for fish, seals and the occasional beached whale. The Spanish arrived in 1774, scouted the area as a possible mission site and named it The Lake of Our Lady of Mercy – which later became the corrupted Spanish/English “Merced.”
Hi. My name is Allison and I am a recent transplant from the Florida Keys, a chain of tiny islands that has one main, stick-straight road, and the impossibility of getting lost. After moving to San Francisco in 2008 and getting lost for the umpteenth time, I made it a goal to walk every street to get my bearings in this hilly, twisted town. After 12 months of steady plodding, I am about 400 miles into the journey. To keep track of where I’ve been, I keep a blog, http://allisonwalkssf.com.
Note: Writing a column every two weeks — and doing the walks on which it’s based — can take up a lot of time. And the onset of winter brings fewer daylight hours in which to do the walking. That means that Allison’s column will move to a monthly schedule after this installment. Look for more Allison Walks Dec. 17. – Tom Prete
Can’t confirm about the fish, but the outlet to the ocean went where the Zoo is now.
One of these pages has a creek study that shows where it was.
Interesting, I had never thought about the fish being adapted to fresh water/salty water.
I saved these URLs from an earlier reading session.
http://bss.sfsu.edu/holzman/Lakemerced/landuse.htm A study about the lake
http://bss.sfsu.edu/holzman/LakeMerced/Default.htm
http://www.museumca.org/creeks/1700-RescMerced.html
http://www.lmtf.org/FoLM/homepage.html Friends of Lake Merced
Cheers,
Erica
now studying Sanchez Creek in Burlingame
Hi Allison!
Enjoyed your walk around the lake and the gorgeous pictures!
I lived nearby for a big chunk of my life, so I’m familiar with the area, and I couldn’t figure out which golf course that was a picture of – Harding Park is in the center of the 2 lakes, and the Olympic Club is south of them, across John Muir Drive.
Also the Rod and Gun Club is only open 2 days a week, so quiet and non-dangerous the rest of the time.
Parkmerced was previously owned by a well-known person who went to prison after being quoted as saying: “Taxes? Taxes are for the little people!” Their website used to show their plans for updating and renovating the complex, but they might have had to put them on hold because of the economy.
One obscure unassuming building just up Winston from the lake is the Sutro Library, the largest genealogical research facility in the Bay Area, with microfilms of all the censuses from the entire USA from the beginning.
Lake Merced has a website telling how it is a freshwater lake (or 2) next to the ocean.
You can tell I LIKE the lake!
You have my admiration for your walks! You’ll discover the best of SF that way, and I’ll be checking out your blog.
Cheers!
Thanks Erica! That is some very excellent info regarding the lake and surrounding area. I’m intrigued by the library…I will definitely plan another walk that ends on the inside of the library so I can check out the old records.
When I walked around the lake, I didn’t even think about whether it was fresh water. Since you mention it, I searched around the internet to see if it was always that way, and came across this conversation about it on at greenspun.com:
http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000O90
Apparently, the lake was not only fed by fresh water streams and an underground spring, but it also used to have an opening to the ocean on its west side which would ebb and flow, changing the salinity of the lake constantly. The opening has since been paved closed so that the lake does not receive salty water from the ocean, but according to one reader, some of the fish that swim in the lake are still fresh-and-salt water adapted.
Can someone confirm this?
I can’t give any scientific confirmation off the cuff, but I used to fish at the lake frequently when I was a boy. Although almost all the fish we caught were the rainbow trout that had been planted there, sometimes we would catch two other kinds of fish. One was what we called “tule perch,” which very closely resembled small surfperch, such as shiner surfperch. Another was what we called “bullheads,” which were somewhat like a buffalo sculpin or staghorn sculpin. Shiner surfperch and sculpins often are found in the upper parts of San Francisco Bay, where the salinity can be much lower than in the parts closer to the Golden Gate — but this is just anecdotal stuff from 30 years ago, and the resemblance of these Lake Merced fish to SF Bay fish may be merely superficial.
Furthermore, the trout’s stomachs often were filled with small shrimp-like creatures about the size of brine shrimp. These shrimp used to be present in much of the lake, sometimes in great clouds that could be seen moving slowly through the water. And sometimes we would snag some sort of mussel or clam that lived at the bottom of the lake. These were a little smaller than a hamburger bun, dark brown on the outside but bright and shiny on the inside of the shell.