The Colma Creek Collective is a growing network of people in northern San Mateo County who care for the Colma Creek watershed.
Our community-led activities monitor and restore the health of the creek at its two most publicly accessible portions—the headwaters at San Bruno Mountain State and County Park and the shoreline marsh of Colma Creek along the San Francisco Bay Trail.
The Colma Creek Collective is a project partnership of San Bruno Mountain Watch and Rise South City.
We thank the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the San Mateo County Parks Foundation for their generous support of this project.
We also appreciate the support of the San Mateo County Parks and the City of South San Francisco.
Background: Caring for Colma Creek, From San Bruno Mountain to San Francisco Bay
There have been many community-based efforts to restore Colma Creek on San Bruno Mountain, beginning with the Heart of the Mountain project in the early 2000s.
In recent years, visions of transforming the urban reaches of the creek have also come alive.
In 2018, San Bruno Mountain Watch served as a community partner to the Resilient South City project team, led by Hassell, as part of the Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge. The project produced “a proposal to create more public green space and continuous public access along South San Francisco’s Colma Creek, aiming to reduce the impacts of flooding, mitigate against sea-level rise vulnerability, restore native flora and fauna, and create more amenity and healthy lifestyle opportunities by connecting a continuous public corridor from Orange Memorial Park to a new public park at the shoreline.”
Our role as a community partner was often that of an interpreter, seeking to help a very big member of the watershed, San Bruno Mountain itself, provide rooted inspiration and reference for the project vision. For example, the tremendous native flora found on the mountain provides fitting candidates to vegetate the green infrastructure solutions and vibrant community corridors proposed by the Resilient South City team.
We also engaged youth, leading trips for South San Francisco high school students to the creek’s origins. Together, we hiked the headwaters of the creek on misty mountain mornings, took in the view of the whole watershed from the ridge, and then carried the fragrance and feeling of lush riparian vegetation and birdsong down the mountain to walk along the city creek and the chain-link, with a vision of a greener, softer, more inviting world waiting to sprout again from beneath the concrete slabs.
The project received additional funding in 2020 to continue planning and design efforts, supporting the work of Hassell and its project collaborators, including the City of South San Francisco, San Bruno Mountain Watch, Rise South City, the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone.
As part of the Colma Creek Restoration and Adaptation project, San Bruno Mountain Watch led school field trips and public tours of the Colma Creek shoreline east of Highway 101 in 2022 and 2023. We also implemented a demonstration restoration project that modeled community engagement in removing invasive plants from the creek marsh and planting assemblages of native marsh and upland plant species.
In 2024, San Bruno Mountain Watch partnered with Rise South City to continue grassroots engagement on Colma Creek through an initiative called the Colma Creek Collective. We seek to foster community-based restoration efforts of the creek from its headwaters on San Bruno Mountain to its shoreline along the San Francisco Bay. We help people explore the many stories of the watershed so they can envision how the creek has been dramatically altered over time—and empower them to shape the creek's future with their own hands.
