Visited on 3/10/2019,
Jeff and I took a drive with our pups, Summer and Skye to the San Francisco Bay
Area to take a tour of all of the lakes in Contra Costa County and a couple in
Alameda County. Our first stop was San
Pablo Reservoir. This body of water is
an open cut terminal water storage reservoir owned and operated by the East Bay
Municipal Utility District (EBMUD). It is tucked in the beautiful valley of San
Pablo Creek, north of Orinda, California and south of El Sobrante and Richmond, east of
the Berkeley Hills between San Pablo Ridge and Sobrante Ridge.
The earthen San Pablo
Dam was built in 1919 and is located on the west end and the El Sobrante end of
the reservoir, above Kennedy Grove. The reservoir is located at 305 feet above
sea level and is 854 surface acres in size. A water tunnel runs under the hills to the
west from the reservoir to a pumping plant in Kensington. The San Pablo Dam
Road runs along the west side of the reservoir. EBMUD's Briones Reservoir is in
the hills southeast of the San Pablo Reservoir and drains into the reservoir. Although the dam impounds the waters of San
Pablo Creek, the great bulk of its water is imported via the Mokelumne Aqueduct
from Pardee Reservoir located over a hundred miles to the east in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
EBMUD owns and
maintains the San Pablo Reservoir Recreation Area, which consists of boating
and fishing access to the reservoir itself, and some watershed land on the west
side of the reservoir. Because this
reservoir is a storage facility for drinking water, swimming and wading are
prohibited. Fishing, boating, and canoeing are allowed. However, to reduce the
possibility of gasoline components in the reservoir, only four-cycle engines
using MTBE-free gasoline are allowed.
San Pablo Reservoir
was the potential venue for the rowing and canoe races in the case that San
Francisco would host the 2024 Summer Olympics.
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