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Alambique Creek

River in San Mateo County, California, United States

Summary

River in San Mateo County, California, United States

Field	Value
name	Alambique Creek
name_etymology	Spanish language
pushpin_map	USA California
pushpin_map_caption	Location of the mouth in California
subdivision_type1	Country
subdivision_name1	United States
subdivision_type2	State
subdivision_name2	California
subdivision_type3	Region
subdivision_name3	Southeastern San Mateo County
subdivision_type5	City
subdivision_name5	Woodside, California
source1_location	Wunderlich County Park
source1_coordinates
source1_elevation	1930 ft
mouth	Sausal Creek
mouth_location	Middle Searsville Pond (Middle Searsville Marsh) just above Searsville Lake
mouth_coordinates
mouth_elevation	342 ft

Alambique Creek, or Arroyo Alembique, is a 2.7 mi stream located in San Mateo County, California, in the United States. It is a tributary to Corte Madera Creek and is part of the San Francisquito Creek watershed.

History

Snippet of Easton's 1868 Official San Mateo County Map showing the historical town of Searsville in between Alambique Creek (Arroyo Alembique) and Sausal Creek (and its Martin Creek tributary). Searsville was inundated by Searsville Dam and Reservoir in 1891. Modified to also show Bear Creek and San Francisquito Creek.

Detail from 1857 Plat of Rancho El Corte de Madera

The creek flowed through the hamlet of Searsville

The creek's name is Spanish 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, 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 on Bear Gulch Road near the intersection with Bear Glen Drive. Next, Alambique Creek flows through a culvert under Portola Road into the Middle Searsville Pond (Middle Searsville Marsh) at its confluence with Sausal Creek.{{cite web

Ecology

Alambique Creek was once a historical steelhead trout (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.{{cite web

References

{{cite gnis. 218044. Alambique Creek
U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data. [http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ The National Map] {{webarchive. link. (2012-03-29 , accessed 2012-02-11)
Herb Dengler. (1997). "History Recorded in a Name: Alambique Creek". Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.
(30 November 1998). "1500 California place names: their origin and meaning". University of California Press.
(2008). "Wunderlich Park". County of San Mateo.
(2010). "Historic Resource Study for Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Mateo County". National Park Service.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

rivers-of-san-mateo-county,-california rivers-of-northern-california tributaries-of-san-francisquito-creek

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