Pescadero Marsh: Ten Thousand Years of Hunting and Gathering

Just east of the highway, behind the dunes, the land opens into something that should not be here on this particular stretch of coast: a marsh. Pescadero Marsh is the only extensive coastal wetland on the entire San Francisco Peninsula, formed where Pescadero Creek and Butano Creek converge before reaching the sea. It covers roughly a thousand acres of tidal flat, freshwater marsh, and riparian woodland. From a moving car it looks like a gap in the landscape. Stop, and it is the landscape.

The Ohlone people who used this watershed were the Quiroste and Oljon groups, and archaeological evidence of their presence goes back thousands of years. Shell mound sites in the region indicate long-term occupation of the watershed, the accumulated material record of communities harvesting the marsh's resources season after season: waterfowl, shellfish, fish from the creek, tule reeds for construction. When Spanish explorers made contact with the Ohlone of this coast in the seventeen seventies, they found multiple village sites around the marsh in active use. The marsh was not scenery. It was the economic foundation of a way of life.

State Parks began acquiring land at Pescadero in nineteen fifty-eight. The process was not fast, and neither was the recovery of the wetland from a century of agricultural drainage and diking. The marsh today supports over three hundred species of birds. Monarch butterflies overwinter in the eucalyptus grove at the preserve's edge. Great blue herons work the shallows in the late afternoon.

The categories that organize this landscape, state park, natural preserve, protected wetland, are less than a hundred years old. The marsh is ten thousand years older than all of them.