Saturday, November 03, 2007

San Francisquito Canyon - Friday 11/2/2007


This is Power Plant No. 2 in San Francisquito Canyon. Those pipes are 6-8 feet in diameter each! I wish I could have gotten better pictures of the amazing architecture of this remote building, but in this post-9/11 era everything to do with utilities is hard to get to.

Mom and I took a drive today. Headed out Lake Elisabeth Road from Palmdale and ended up on San Francisquito Canyon Road, heading south.

I've had a long fascination with the Saint Francis Dam disaster of March 12, 1928, probably because the dam was built to contain water brought here via the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens Valley. I dunno, I find big public works very moving... While they are impressive, they usually occasion great loss for a few people while creating something intended to provide a greater good to a large population (usually by investors and public officials who get to put their names on plaques.)

Anyway, it's called the greatest civil engineering disaster of the 20th century. More than 400 people died in the flood after the dam broke. Waters raged toward the ocean from this spot about 15 miles north of Saugus, through what's now Valencia, Fillmore, Santa Paula, all the way to Ventura.

Well, you can read about it yourself through the links above.


The thing that astonished me was that San Francisquito Road itself has been rerouted since I was there last! Has it been that long!?

I was driving along looking for this live oak tree and fence. That's where we used to park and walk back to the left of this shot to get to the fallen "tombstone" remains of the center of the dam. I really liked knowing how to find it by that tree. It's a wonderful canopy with a lot of space underneath...feels like it would be a great place to camp, if you could camp there.

We were there some time after the Copper Fire in 2002 and saw more of the dam exposed than we'd realized was still extant. Here are the old directions to the site.

Here are new directions to the site. This map and other information are posted at the fire station just south of Power Plant No. 2.

It was interesting to be out and about for the day. Pretty tiring. I guess the stamina is building bit by bit. I think returning to work next week is going to hit a little hard! Ah, but it's life!

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