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San Francisquito Canyon. October 19, 2019. I hiked up the closed section of road to snap some photographs of the St. Francis Dam ruins. The last time I took photos there was about twelve years ago.

From Copperhill Drive, I drove north up San Francisquito Canyon Road for about six miles, until coming to an intersection where the new section of road branches off west, bypassing the old section, which was blocked from traffic with a concrete barricade.

I parked my car, ambled passed the barrier and began my mile-and-a-half jaunt to ground zero – the spot where once stood the engineering marvel that was the St. Francis Dam. Engineering marvel? That’s arguable. But it was big, rising 205 feet above the ground. When it collapsed minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the reservoir, which had been restrained by the dam’s magnificent weight, was filled to the crest with its maximum capacity of 38,000 acre feet of water; that’s over 12 billion gallons.

As I made my way along the decrepit roadway, huge gaps of missing pavement gave me pause. Much of the west side of the road had eroded away and crumbled into the stream bed below. I stayed on the east side. The path turned a corner, and a short while later I saw the first of the enormous concrete blocks to be carried downstream by the flood on that harrowing night 90 years ago.