Natural & Cultural History - Save Strawberry Canyon

"The varied and rugged topography of Strawberry Canyon ... has favored the establishment of a rich diversity of plant and animal life, such that Strawberry Canyon today is one of the finest natural areas of comparable size in the Bay Area." (Garrett Eckbo, 1976)

The natural and cultural history of Strawberry Canyon are inevitably intertwined. The landscape, with its robust stream and steep surrounding hills, determined the human uses of the Canyon which in turned shaped the Canyon itself over the years.

Considering the Canyon from ground up, the Canyon and its hills reveal its geologic history of the eons when the region lay under a warm sea and subsequently was uplifted, tilted, and folded. Original soils and marine deposits were metamorphosed over time by heat and pressure. Later, volcanic intrusions created the basaltic outcroppings of rock that we see today along with a melange of sandstones, siltstones, and shales.

But it is the Hayward Fault, crossing the mouth of the Canyon, which has determined today's landscape. The steep Berkeley Hills, a fast-growing range, are the product of this active fault.

Springs in the Canyon gave birth to Strawberry Creek, a vigorous year-round stream which carved out its own deep ravine before reaching the broad sloping plain where it meandered west before flowing into the Bay. Spawning salmon once worked their way upstream. Mountain lions, grizzly bears, and wolves prowled the Canyon.

The first inhabitants attracted to the region were tribes of Huchiun-Ohlone Indians who were sustained by the rich bounty of the land - acorns from the oaks, fruits and seeds, fish and other animals. They periodically burned the grasslands to inhibit the invasion of brush and to insure a good supply of tubers seeds produced by wildflowers.

In the late 18th century, the first Europeans brought their long-horned cattle to graze the grasslands, replacing both the Indians and the elk herds. With the cattle came imported annual grasses which, along with heavy grazing, replaced the perennial bunch grasses, radically altering the grasslands forever.

By the mid-1800s, dairy farmers settled in the Canyon. Two dairies, the Such Dairy and the Stutt Dairy (later Stanley Farm) supplied milk to the growing community. Photographs of the period show an open canyon of grazed grasslands with native live oaks and bays mostly restricted to the stream channels.

Locating the fledgling University of California along Strawberry Creek is part of the cultural history of the stream and its canyon. The beauty of the physical setting - the stream, the oak woodlands, the high hills and the views out through the Golden Gate - influenced the choice, but most important was the promise of a reliable water source. Even in drought years, the stream and its springs produce 100,000 gallons of water a day. A system of reservoirs and conduits was developed by the University as shown in Soule's map (see map section).

(I)"All other striking advantages of this location could not make it a place fit to be chosen as the College Home without this water. With it every excellence is of double value." (Willey, 1887)

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead visited the campus and neighborhood in the 1860's (he was responsible for designing Piedmont Ave with its median strip) and took note of the Canyon, describing it as "a unique and most valuable appendage to the general local attractions of the neighborhood."

The early 1900s were the heyday of tree planting. Early photos of the Canyon and the Berkeley Hills show young plantations of eucalyptus along with smaller numbers of conifers. Many of the eucalyptus were planted along ridge lines. Though the wood did not fulfill its promise as a source of lumber because of certain undesirable physical characteristics, the leaves 'harvesting' the summer fog produce a drip equal in some locations to the annual rainfall of the area.

The University began acquiring Canyon lands in 1909, though cattle grazing continued into the 1930s.

Because of the natural beauty of the Canyon and the proximity to the University, the south side of the Canyon near the Canyon mouth became a desirable neighborhood. The new residents employed some of the finest local architects to design their homes.

Julia Morgan designed a house for Professor of Botany Willis Jepson, who developed the first taxonomy of California native plants. A few doors up the street on Mosswood Road was the John Hudson Thomas-remodeled house where Marion and Edward Parsons lived, both early key figures in the Sierra Club.

Other Mosswood neighbors included Professor of Classics James Allen and his wife Amelia Sanborn Allen, who enriched the appreciation of the natural history of the Canyon with her articles on the woodland bird life. The homes in the area now referred to as Panoramic Hill are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 1920s ushered in some profound changes in the Canyon - one benign and one destructive.

Plants from the Botanical Garden, then located in the center of the Campus, were moved up into the Canyon between 1919 and 1926 when the Botanical Garden opened. Two branches of Strawberry Creek flow through the 33 acre Garden which is divided into geographic regions of the world, with the largest single section at its lower, western end devoted to native plants of California. A valuable source for serious study, the Garden - the oldest and largest university botanical garden - is also open to the public.

The most significant, and destructive, alteration to the Canyon came in 1921 with the building of Memorial Stadium in the Canyon mouth. It was a massive enterprise employing hydraulic mining techniques where jets of water blasted away the hillsides (along with dynamite) to provide space and landfill for the Beaux-art structure, designed by John Galen Howard.

Strawberry Canyon was not John Galen Howard's first choice as a site for Memorial Stadium, in part because the site required massive excavation and because the stadium would straddle the Hayward Fault. Howard preferred a downtown site (now Edwards Field). In spite of community protests, pressure from the trustees (now the Regents) and because the University already owned part of the site, the mouth of Canyon was chosen. In the "can do" era of the 1920s the engineering problems were thought to be solvable - dynamite Charter Hill for landfill, culvert the creek under the Stadium, and place expansion joints between concrete sections to accommodate movement along the fault. Unfortunately streams are prone to escape their culverts in heavy rains, and movement along the fault eventually required the demolition and reconstruction of the stadium.

The original stadium was completed just in time for the 1923 Big Game. Its stunning location with views up the beautiful Canyon and out over the Bay through the Golden Gate, and its elegant style, made it one or the most admired stadiums in the country. Boosters liked to brag that its dimensions "slightly exceed the great coliseum of Rome."

In 1930, the Mather Redwood Grove was planted in the Botanical Garden with approximately 150 Coast Redwoods in tribute to Stephen Mather, founding director of the National Park Service and an 1887 Cal graduate.

During the Great Depression era, the California Conservation Corps (CCC) built an amphitheater in the redwood grove along with several stone bridges in the Canyon.

World War II ushered in what would prove to be the greatest change in the Canyon and its watershed. Seeking isolation more suitable for highly secret research, Ernest Lawrence moved his cyclotron from a small wooden building on the campus to a domed structure high up on the hill where a new, more powerful accelerator was pressed into wartime service, separating atoms to produce the pure plutonium that would be part of the first atomic bomb. The Radiation Laboratory, renamed Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, became the preeminent high energy facility in the world. Buildings spread across the hillside on leased University land down almost to the campus.

While the lab was developing the hillside, the University built a recreational facility in 1959 at the bottom of the Canyon just east of Memorial Stadium. The facility includes meeting rooms, offices, and changing rooms for the two swimming pools. The upper pool has since been closed because of structural problems.

Members of the UC Berkeley academic community, concerned about protecting the Canyon for teaching and research, proposed setting aside areas, called the Ecological Study Area (ESA) which would remain pristine and undeveloped in perpetuity. UC Chancellor Albert Bowker affirmed his support of the 300-acre ESA in Strawberry Canyon in 1972.

Renamed again as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the lab complex began to diversify into other branches of science, most recently venturing into the lucrative bioenergy research field. Although suitable offsite locations are available, LBNL proposed building a number of large new facilities in the Canyon.

It was the desire to protect this incomparable Canyon from inappropriate development that led a group of citizens to form Save Strawberry Canyon in 2008.

The Canyon and its surrounding watershed are home to a rich variety of plants and animals. The riparian corridors that follow the streams are home to live oaks, bays, willow, white alder, bigleaf maple, and buckeye along with a lush understory of plants such as coffeeberry, currant, toyon, snowberry, and hazel.

The steep slopes support grasslands and coastal scrub which is dominated by coyote bush with monkey flower, and California sage. On the north-facing slopes, the Forestry Department over the years has planted a number of non-native conifers.

LBNL, in an environmental impact report for one of the proposed facilities, acknowledged that construction would potentially affect special-status plants in the coastal scrub habitat as well as the Alameda whipsnake, a California and federally-listed Endangered Species.

According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, Strawberry Canyon is home to at least four species of birds on the National Audubon Society and American Bird Conservancy Watch List of potentially endangered species: Allen's hummingbird, California thrasher, Nutall's Woodpecker, oak titmouse, wrentit and the olive-sided flycatcher (which was recently added to the California Bird Species of Special Concern list).

The Canyon is a corridor for an occasional mountain lion. It is also home to the gray fox and to a variety of small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles.

In every season, a visit to the Canyon restores the sprit. In the spring when breeding birds return to build their nests and raise their young, the Canyon rings with their songs. In the summer, the grasslands turn gold, acorns and berries ripen, and warm days are cooled by ocean fogs. Fall is the season of waiting for the first rains, when the bigleaf maple turns gold. Winter storms bring their life-giving rains, turning quiet streams into exuberant waterways.

But what distinguishes the Canyon is that all this beauty and rich wildlife is within walking distance of the dense urban communities of Berkeley and the UC Campus.

Natural & Cultural History of Strawberry Canyon