Alambique Creek, or ''Arroyo Alembique'', is a
[U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data]
The National Map
, accessed 2012-02-11 stream located in
San Mateo County
San Mateo County ( ), officially the County of San Mateo, is a county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 764,442. Redwood City is the county seat, and the third most populated city following Daly ...
,
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
, in the United States. It is tributary to
Corte Madera Creek and is part of the
San Francisquito Creek
San Francisquito Creek (Spanish for "Little San Francisco" - the "little" referring to size of the settlement compared to Mission San Francisco de Asís) is a creek that flows into southwest San Francisco Bay in California, United States. Histo ...
watershed.
History
The creek's name is
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
for "still," referring to a liquor
distillery.
Older Spanish spells it ''alembique'' with an "e". The English spelling is ''alembic'', a type of still that is used today. The ''e'' spelling dominates in the 1800s and continued on most maps until the 1930s. The name refers to
moonshiners Tom Bowen and Nicholas Dawson, English seaman deserters, who built an illegal still on the creek in 1842.
The creek runs through
Wunderlich Park in
Woodside, California
Woodside is a small incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, United States, on the San Francisco Peninsula. Woodside is among the wealthiest communities in the United States, home to many technology billionaires and investment manager ...
, where, in 1904, the creek was used by
J. A. Folger for the first
hydro-electrical power system in the region.
Watershed
Alambique Creek begins below
Skyline Boulevard
A skyline is the outline or shape viewed near the horizon. It can be created by a city’s overall structure, or by human intervention in a rural setting, or in nature that is formed where the sky meets buildings or the land.
City skyline ...
on Bear Gulch Road near the intersection with Bear Glen Drive.
[ After crossing La Honda Road, and just south of the intersection of Mountain Home Road and Portola Road, Alambique Creek enters Lloyd's Pond (Upper Searsville Pond) which is currently impounded by the road-fill of Portola Road and a culvert. Of note, Lloyd's Pond is likely named for William Lloyd (1823-1895), who operated a blacksmith shop in historic Searsville, and who partnered with other early pioneers Dr. Robert O. Tripp, James "Grizzly" Ryder, and Alvinza Hayward, a bullwhacker from Amador County, to harvest the redwoods. Next, Alambique Creek flows through a culvert under Portola Road into the Middle Searsville Pond (Middle Searsville Marsh) at its confluence with ]Sausal Creek
The Sausal () is a small mountain range in the southwestern parts of Austria's state Styria. It thrusts up from the northern banks of the Sulm valley, west of the district town of Leibnitz. Its highest point, the summit of the Demmerkogel, rises ...
.[
]
Ecology
Alambique Creek was once a historical steelhead trout
Steelhead, or occasionally steelhead trout, is the common name of the anadromous form of the coastal rainbow trout or redband trout (O. m. gairdneri). Steelhead are native to cold-water tributaries of the Pacific basin in Northeast Asia and ...
(coastal rainbow trout) (''Oncorhynchus mykiss irideus'') spawning stream. In 1981, the creek was fish sampled and two stream resident rainbow trout which have been isolated from the Bay by Searsville Dam were collected where the creek crosses La Honda Road. In May 2002, the culvert beneath Highway 84 was identified as an impassable barrier to upstream migration.
See also
*List of watercourses in the San Francisco Bay Area
These watercourses (rivers, creeks, sloughs, etc.) in the San Francisco Bay Area are grouped according to the bodies of water they flow into. Tributaries are listed under the watercourses they feed, sorted by the elevation of the confluence so tha ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
San Francisquito Watershed Map, Oakland Museum
Rivers of San Mateo County, California
Rivers of Northern California
Tributaries of San Francisquito Creek