Day 1: San Jose to Sac by bike - Oh so much water infrastructure!

Here we are at Ed Levin Park in Santa Clara County. Right before we arrived here, off to the right, I noticed an iron archway. It turned out to be an old pioneer cemetery called Laguna Cemetery. I've passed that a million times descending Sierra and never once noticed it as I zoomed by. It's a cool little bit of our history.

Every year, Valley Water boardmembers and staff make at least one trip to Sacramento to meet with legislators to share our priorities. This year I decided to bike up over four days and explore water infrastructure along the way.

Day 1 from San Jose to Dublin is chronicled below. Before I get started though I have to say really, really, really, loudly: BIKE TOURING IS SOOO FUN! Seeing and experiencing things at a bike level and speed is the best. Okay - here we go. Weeee!

I had two main goals for the trip:

1. Ride via the Calaveras Reservoir because it's pretty and is a big part of the Hetch Hetchy/SFPUC system and

2. Ride through the Bay Delta since as an alternate on the Delta Conveyance Authority board, the pipeline and all the issues around it are something I should constantly be learning about.

SFPUC, Calaveras, and Hetch Hetchy

Many of us bicyclists ride past Calaveras Reservoir a lot because it's a beautiful ride. But did you know this is an important part of San Francisco PUC's water supply system? The system starts with a huge dam in Yosemite called O'Shaughnessy, the same one that flooded the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley. The Valley was seasonally inhabited by several native tribes and its inundation sparked a nationwide environmental movement.

From there, this mostly gravity fed system follows the San Joaquin pipeline and then the Coast Range tunnel before getting to the Bay Area.

Overall, SFPUC supplies water to 2.7 million residents living in 27 cities in San Francisco, Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. Ten percent of Santa Clara County's water is supplied by SFPUC.

So how big is Calaveras reservoir? It holds almost 100k acre feet of water. Our biggest reservoir, Anderson, holds about 90k acre feet. In total, SFPUC has ten main/regional reservoirs along with 12 in-city reservoirs with a capacity to store almost 900k acre feet of water. Our ten reservoirs hold 170k acre feet.

I dwell on this because storage is important. Like a bank account, you squirrell water away in the wet years to be spent down when it's dry. Without enough storage, trouble comes in a prolonged drought.

Although we don't have nearly as much surface storage as SFPUC, never fear. Our aquifers are bigger than their aquifers! We store about 400k acre feet underground. This is in addition to our water banking in Wasco, which I talk about in this blog.

Pedaling on...

Once past Calaveras, there are several key pieces of SFPUC water infrastructure including the Sunol Valley Treatment Plant as well as the San Antonio pumping station which moves water into the SFPUC distribution system. The SFPUC system map is below to help you trace how water gets from the beautiful Yosemite Valley to the taps of San Francisco residents.

Dublin

We arrived in Dublin via some beautiful backroads passing some ginormous houses. Our Airbnb was near the BART station and while the development we stayed in was clearly a planned community meant to be transit oriented development, once out of that little area, Dublin seems to be the home of six lane streets. We walked to the Hacienda shopping center, ate dinner, watched Sheep Detectives, and called it a night.

Sneak Peak of Day 2

Dublin to Antioch via the Iron Horse Trail, an old rail line repurposed to a 32 mile trail. Also, to ride the Antioch Bridge or no?