This October, 2004, the Friends of Mount Diablo Creek received a grant from the Watershed Project, a non-profit environmental education and watershed awareness organization. Staff from the Watershed Project will be spending over 100 hours designing a creek access point for us at the Clayton Library and helping us to use it as an educational tool. The area will be vegetated with native plants, and labeled for educational purposes. The access point will also be structurally improved for use as a learning circle for local school groups or for passing hikers’ enjoyment.

Used in conjunction with interpretive signage, creek access points can serve two of the Friends of Mount Diablo Creeks goals – education and increasing resident’s quality of life. So far, the Friends have distributed literature, created a website, and visited other local clubs to meet our educational goal. We also hold monthly meetings and outdoor events. Of all these methods of education, none comes close to the power of actually bringing folks into the creek. It is important not only to increase awareness of neighborhood culverts and storm drain systems, but to entice people to sit and enjoy the serenity of a naturally landscaped portion of the creek.

I think this creek access point will be our most powerful weapon in education of the watershed residents. Its convenient location along a well-used trail makes it perfect for drawing in any passerby. Eventually we envision an interpretive sign highlighting features of the watershed and a few key stewardship messages. The library’s butterfly garden is already drawing in local wildlife which will appreciate the improvement of this critical habitat. The city of Walnut Creek, our neighboring watershed completed a very successful project, called the Creek Walk, in 1997. Pictures of this project and of local native plant and butterfly species can be seen at http://www.ci.walnut-creek.ca.us/butterfly/butterfly.htm. Of course, we can expect similar species in our watershed as well.

There will be many opportunities to volunteer on this project. Installation of the native plant garden should be happening by late spring or summer. There may also be opportunities to remove nearby stands of Arundo, or giant reed from the creek in the summer time, thereby drawing in our third goal of habitat restoration. Occasional weeding parties will be an ongoing maintenance need as well. We hope you are as excited as we are about this great opportunity. It should be a great learning experience, one that can be hopefully replicated downstream many times over.