After wrapping up my 2019 sightseeing in and beyond the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, I expected that my next sightseeing trip would be to Spain in 2020. But we remember what happened in 2020. Throughout the worst of the pandemic, I was determined that as soon as I could, I’d board a plane to my beloved Berlin, even if it meant pushing my trip to Spain further out. So I did this in August of 2021. Then in 2022, I made 3 trips to Europe. Insane! The 1st was to Amsterdam and Antwerp. The 2nd was to Manchester and London. The 3rd was to Tromsø, a Norwegian city hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle. And that was in November, if you can imagine.
None of these were sightseeing trips. They were primarily social visits. Of course I did do a bit of sightseeing, especially as it was my first time to Manchester and Tromsø. (And a Liverpudlian friend helped me have a great day trip to Liverpool from Manchester.) So I finally made was able to reschedule my trip to Spain for 2023. But I couldn’t hold out that long without doing some sightseeing. So I squeezed in some local and semi-local sightseeing in between the 2022 trips to Europe.
In August of 2022, I did a weekend getaway to a most unlikely place: Stockton. Stockton does not have a reputation as being the most attractive city in California. Would it live down to its reputation? We’ll see. In October, I did a day trip to a place I’d already visited in 2018: Martinez. You may recall I went to Martinez to visit John Muir National Historic Site. You also may recall that my scheduled visit to Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial that day was canceled. So in 2022, I returned to Martinez to finally see the Port Chicago site and also to get a better feel for the history of Martinez, a place I was curious about.
And what do Stockton and Martinez have in common? Water. They’re connected by water that’s part of a vast interconnected system of waterways that run from California’s Central Valley to San Francisco Bay. Water runs down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada to the Central Valley, forming the Sacramento River in the north and the San Joaquin River in the south. The watershed of the Central Valley is 1/3 of the land area of California. And about 50% of all the water that flows through California flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin river system. That’s a lot of water!
When the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet to flow into the large estuary system that makes up San Francisco Bay, it’s a little messy. You might expect the 2 rivers to meet neatly at a point at Suison Bay, the easternmost extension of the San Francisco Bay tidal estuary. Instead, the waters of the 2 rivers create a triangular web of waterways as they approach each other. This web is the unusual Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, also known as the California Delta.
As you can see in the map above, the Sacramento River flows down from the north and the San Joaquin River flows up from the south, both having been fed from waters flowing down from the western slope of the Sierra Nevada (and to a lesser extent, the eastern slopes of the California Coast Ranges). The California Delta is the jumble of waterways located where the 2 rivers come together. The total area of the delta is about 1,100 square miles. It’s made up of 700 miles of waterways and almost 200 islands.
I said above that the delta is unusual. What makes it unusual is that it’s an inverted river delta. When you think of deltas such as the Nile, the Amazon, and the Mississippi, they fan out from a point and toward the sea. With the California Delta, its point is toward the sea (in this case, the Pacific Ocean via San Francisco Bay). The California Delta is a prominent example of an inverted river delta. What’s also unusual about the California Delta is that it’s 60 miles inland.
That last fact is what has fascinated me about the California Delta. Well more specifically, the fact that water that far inland is navigable. As a matter of fact, at the end of my 1st day in Martinez, I took a picture of ships in Suison Bay, the easternmost segment of the San Francisco Bay estuary system. It was pretty amazing to me that ships could sail this far inland, and beyond.
As the map shows, Stockton sits on the eastern edge of the inverted delta. It’s located pretty much at the center of the Central Valley–both from north to south and from east to west. The sky blue body of water just to the west of the delta is Suison Bay. The lighter blue body to the west of Suison Bay is San Pablo Bay. They are joined by the very narrow, 8-mile-long Carquinez Strait. The strait cuts through a gap in the California Coast Ranges, allowing the water of the Central Valley to drain to the sea. Martinez its on the Carquinez Strait, so it’s technically not on the delta. But it is part of that expansive inland waterway system. (Port Chicago itself is located on Suison Bay.)
Okay, that’s enough natural history! I just wanted to provide some background for the 2022 sightseeing. I didn’t even do any introductory posts for the 2018 and 2019 sightseeing seasons, including the Northern California excursion. I thought they were pretty self-explanatory. But I felt that there was more going on here, even with only 3 days of sightseeing.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one interested in the California Delta. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has been designated a National Heritage Area. Many of the historic spots we saw in Sacramento are included in the National Heritage Area, as is the Crocker Art Museum.
Coming up soon, my 1st day in Stockton. Yes, Stockton.
[Historical information is primarily gathered from Wikipedia, so you know it must be true.]
Great article! Interesting
Thank you, Brian! More coming soon.