San Francisco Museum and Historical Society in collaboration with Thinkwalks & many other groups present:

5th Annual SF History Expo—Day One

Thinkwalks will have a table. Bring your friends and send your neighbors to come talk with us! There will also be scores of other amazing neighborhood historical excitements, maps, raffles, films, art, some folks dressed in period clothes and other weird diversions.

Best of all, you can explore the vaults and innards of the old mint. See where heaps of silver coins stained the walls through their canvas storage bags.

⭐ No need to RSVP—Just show up!

San Francisco Museum and Historical Society in collaboration with Thinkwalks & many other groups present:

5th Annual SF History Expo—Day Two

Thinkwalks will have a table. Bring your friends and send your neighbors to come talk with us! There will also be scores of other amazing neighborhood historical excitements, maps, raffles, films, art, some folks dressed in period clothes and other weird diversions.

Best of all, you can explore the vaults and innards of the old mint. See where heaps of silver coins stained the walls through their canvas storage bags.

⭐ No need to RSVP—Just show up!
          

Thinkwalks presents an exploration walk:

Mission: Water Walking

Why is the Mission of San Francisco called ‘Dolores’? Yet, the city was called ‘San Francisco’!

We’ll debunk this bronzed (but incoherent) claim!

We’ll explore along water routes where creeks once flowed, before the city grew up. Some are still flowing, hidden. We’ll delve into both practical and political sides of local drinking water, sewers, wells, hydrants and reservoirs. In the process, you’ll find out how this place came to be a population center. Coolest of all, we’ll debunk SF’s founding lore (“Founded on a now-vanished freshwater lake”) and see how that myth came into being.

Highlights: sinking hotels, lagunas and arroyos, gas in the ground, old well data, The Willows resort, old photos, water tables, watersheds, Yelamu villages, forcible conversion, Chula alley, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, Merrill’s mistakes, brutally wrong bronze plaque, Noachian Deluge.

Exploring the Mission District might just leave you awash in water history. Beware the floods!

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Not vigorous exercise! You may get chilled if you forget your extra layers.
↪ End within a few blocks of where we started
↪ Maximum 15 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration ride:

Transportation History Ride

Golden Gate park is a canvass on which the city’s ambitions were sketched.

San Francisco was the first major city on the coast. We’ll discover many firsts in the Park because it was where ideas were tested. The city’s history exactly matches the 160 years of transportation revolutions. We’ll see where a major railroad came right into the park, where the suspension bridge was first tried, where driver licenses were invented, why pedestrians were so feared, and we’ll even learn about street sweeping. This ride will include great discussions between short stretches of riding.

Highlights: Brooklyn Bridge in SF, the Northwest Passage, building roads on sand dunes, echo tunnels, fog & wind, abandoned 12th-20th century castle, racetrack, garage fight, elephant ambulance, old photos, mini eiffel tower.

Come ride around a park which was created out of a transportation challenge: too much horse poop!

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Bring your bike!
↪ Not vigorous exercise! You may get chilled if you forget your extra layers.
↪ End within a few blocks of where we started
↪ Maximum 15 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration hike:

Mt. Sutro Enchanting Forest Hike

Deep within the city of San Francisco a forest grows.

Bizarre chicken-of-the-woods fungus seen on one Mt. Sutro expedition

It’s a complex one, overrun with invasive vines and other political drama. It’s incredible to hike through now that the Sutro Stewards have (recently) provided a working trail network. We’ll see hidden stairways, mysterious artifacts and even freshwater springs as we climb this wooded urban mountain.

Highlights: cave Indian mythologies, hidden creek, lost pond, university hideaways, weapons system sites, fog & wind, fungus, tree erosion sculptures, native plant meadow, birdsong.

Back in 2013, one couple on this Thinkwalk proposed afterward. Now they’re married. Talk about enchanting forest!

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Bring lunch food (sharing tradition optional)
↪ Hike length: approx. 5 miles
↪ Some steep sections
↪ End near 7th Ave.—easy return by public transit.
↪ Maximum 20 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration walk:

Walk Deep in Manure & Park History

The Park was nothing but blowing sand until the manure arrived.

Where the pregnancy test frogs lived. And still may.

Today’s Golden Gate Park is a lush, sculpted garden. What a feat! For 6,000 years it was open dunes. There is one small woodland that’s been there for centuries, if you stretch the definition of “be.” We’ll explore how the park came to be. We’ll visit locations that are glamorous habitat for a pregnancy test frog. We’ll identify bits of a building that’s (strangely) eight centuries old. We’ll explore!

Highlights: dawn redwoods, native oak forest, horseshoe pits, quarries, velociraptor forest, Hearst’s ambitions, old zoo, first playground, earth moving stories, invisible multicolor bridge, fog & wind, the old Downtown of the Park, pedestrian passages, new nature trail, old photos, world’s fair of 1894.

Unearth how your Park was made, and make it even more yours.

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Not vigorous exercise! You may get chilled if you forget your extra layers.
↪ End within a few blocks of where we started
↪ Maximum 15 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration walk:

Divisadero Natural History Walk

A long dune field blew across the city. The ice age was over.

The valley along Devisadero (not a misspelling) was called ‘San Souci’ (that one’s a purposeful misspelling).

Alamo Square Park is an outcrop of rock (one of many) jutting up through the vast dune field. Like all of our bedrock, water springs up through the fissures, even at hilltops. We’ll explore places that were once lakes along Divisadero, springs along Fulton and ridges along Hayes. Those things happened since the Gold Rush, but we’ll look back farther, too.

Highlights: rehabbing park irrigation, San Souci Road House, shanks’ mare to the Presidio, the Central Valley pwns us, William Fell, Hebrew orphans, Hayes Creek, Hayes dune, old maps, fog & wind, viewpoint misspellings.

This, the shortest Thinkwalk we offer, will have a long-lasting effect on the way you view the city. You’ll start seeing things! (like the underlying landscapes!)

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Not vigorous exercise! You may get chilled if you forget your extra layers.
↪ End within a few blocks of where we started
↪ Maximum 15 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration hike:

Hike Our Most Hidden Watershed

San Francisco’s first major reservoir started as a natural lake and again has become just a lake.

An empty Laguna Honda Reservoir after the 1906 quake.

This watershed on the west side of Twin Peaks near 7th Avenue has been through a lot. Sewers flow under the deteriorating concrete bottom of the abandoned reservoir at Laguna Honda. Muni Metro trains run under the creek. We’ll examine the secret back woods of the watershed where no official trails go. Recently, renegade trails have been appearing.

Highlights: springs, hidden tributaries, dunes, private neighborhood, WWII Victory Gardens, rail tunnel vent, SF’s first imported water aqueduct, water for Golden Gate Park, early development, artful hospital detritus.

Be prepared to visit sandy or muddy remote places, some not on any known map.

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Bring lunch food (sharing tradition optional)
↪ Hike length: approx. 5 miles
↪ Includes a few hills
↪ Ends at start location (loop)
↪ Maximum 20 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration walk:

Social Justice Mural Walk

Street art is graffiti. Street art is mural art. Street art is a staple. Literally.

Visiting Collette Crutcher’s sculpted mural on 16th Street

Have you ever noticed the inadvertent collection of poster staples on a wooden pole from a hundred years of community outreach? We’ll explore the Mission. We’ll find random aesthetic drama, along with specific murals and other stunning street art. Joel was a mural organizer before he started Thinkwalks. In the interim, he studied how Mexico’s revolution in 1910 bled art all over San Francisco.

Highlights: earliest known mural, Benny Bufano sculptures, Chinese democracy, art revolutions, Maestrapiece, Susan Greene, CAMP, ‘The Apartment’ by Andrew Schultz & Aaron Noble, Politec paints, anti-interventionisma, Timothy Pflueger, Mona Caron, public painting techniques, Collette Crutcher, Ralph Stackpole, Lucia & Arthur Mathews, Rigo 23, Diego Rivera, socialist realism.

Thousands of murals tucked away in secret places await your inquiring mind.

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Not vigorous exercise! You may get chilled if you forget your extra layers.
↪ End within a few blocks from where we started
↪ Maximum 15 people

Thinkwalks and SF Natural History Series present:

A talk at the Randall Museum

The Most Extreme Storms Yet

Joel Pomerantz of Thinkwalks on the big stage! (It’s actually the last Natural History Talk that will take place in the intimate space of the Randall Museum Theater before a year of renovation begins.)

Joel will share his research on the weather disaster that determined so much of what’s around you today. In early 1862 the sky dumped upwards of ten feet of rain in the mountains (about four feet in San Francisco). In the middle of that, there was a hard freeze for a week down to sea level. Thousands died. Dead cattle and cord-wood piled up on Bay Area beaches, washed out from the river system.

No previous research has connected so many of the dots on this, the most extreme weather disaster in North America’s history.

Come learn about the widespread disaster that spanned more than four states (before all were states), changed the course of rivers and history, destroyed the California economy and brought in invasive grasses, new songs, changes in the way government works, extensive levee projects, and much else. At a time when major increases are expected in overall storm intensity throughout the world, it would be clever of us humans to learn from past extreme weather events.

Knowing how extreme it can be might be the wake-up we need.

⭐ No need to RSVP—Just show up!

Thinkwalks presents an exploration hike:

Glen Park Loop

Some SF waterways never got buried.

Joel shows how to use a tire swing in Glen Canyon!

The creek at Glen Canyon is just one of the many excellent excuses to explore this remarkable neighborhood. We’ll go up and over the hill past rope swings with astounding views on hills named for historic goat ranching. We’ll walk a street called Penny Lane, find the hidden segment of Castro, and get into muddy side-tracks exploring a hidden wetland.

Highlights: daylighting creeks, Little Switzerland, new stairways, micro-vineyard, “Thirty Harry” (not a movie), brick circles, sidewalks springing natural leaks, Pony Express, Joseph Eichler homes, chicken farm, church garden, cops-in-training.

If you’ve dismissed this area because it has no Victorian beauty, you’re missing out on one sweet corner of the city!

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Bring lunch food (sharing tradition optional)
↪ Hike length: approx. 5.5 miles
↪ Steep hills, no mountains
↪ Ends at start location (loop)
↪ Maximum 20 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration hike:

Presidio Creek Geek Hike

Some creeks are so grand. Some are pipsqueak.

Mountain Lake in the 1930s. Its west shore was filled in to accommodate Highway 1 bursting out of a tunnel.

Lobos Creek is the only major surface creek left in San Francisco. It’s big, supplying almost all the water to Presidio buildings with still enough left to gush to the ocean. Dragonfly creek and lots of unnamed creeks we’ll explore are cool, too. They help us understand what leaky San Francisco hillsides were like before development. We’ll see a major natural lake that supplies the creek’s headwaters. We’ll even dig into groundwater studies from the nineteenth century.

Highlights: drinking water out-take, sewer culvert that isn’t a sewer, treatment plant, Chinese themed mansion, Baker Beach, Coyote Gulch, hidden graveyard, invaded jungle, base commander’s mansion, historic community garden, native plant nursery, redwood grove, stone bridge, twin palms, ridge trail, leaky cliffs by the Golden Gate, rehabbed nature, invasive vines, dune boardwalks, Mountain Lake.

Come celebrate San Francisco’s spring-laced geography with this major water geek-out!

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Bring lunch food (sharing tradition optional)
↪ Hike length: approx. 5.5 miles
↪ Steep hills, no mountains
↪ Ends at start location (loop)
↪ Maximum 20 people

Thinkwalks presents an exploration walk:

Wiggle Walk

You thought you knew the Wiggle. There’s more to know!

Evidence of 1862 reservoir that’s no longer here beside Market Street. Who even notices the sign?

Yes, true, it was named the Wiggle due to the zigzag of bike route #30 through the neighborhood and avoiding hills. But how about the dunes? What of Martin Luther King? We’ll explore the ‘hood from this, that and askew angles: geology, activism history, water, native tribes, etc. There once was a spring here. Without it, the city would never have existed. There was also a green rocky mountain here. The top was chopped off—twice. In the 1960s, this unexpectedly radical neighborhood introduced a major glitch in California’s plan to pave highways everywhere. That twist created our current version of democracy.

Highlights: Market Street punched through rock, flume from San Mateo County, 1928 highway design, insanely huge floods, Yelamu village of Chutchui, old photos, linear dunes, first gay couple, black financial power, sharrows, freeway revolt, Bike Coalition history, Duboce mural, Captain Anza’s journal, photography innovations.

Thinkwalking is all about how the natural landscape determined the city’s shape. No place better to see that than the Wiggle.

☆ RSVP required
↪ Rain or shine
↪ Not vigorous exercise! You may get chilled if you forget your extra layers.
↪ End within a few blocks of where we started
↪ Maximum 15 people