Congratulations to Michael Stewart, our contest winner!
To all of our entrants: Thank you for sharing your river stories!

Lobos Creek—The Ansel Adams Connection

Every community has people who are committed to taking care of our water. This year, our River Stories Video Contest invited you to tell your own story about how you're working to help preserve and protect the rivers in your own community, and we offered a Toyota Prius as a prize!

We're excited to announce the winner: congratulations to Michael Stewart of San Francisco, CA, and his video story "Lobos Creek—The Ansel Adams Connection." Michael is a volunteer for the Surfrider Foundation and his story focuses on Lobos Creek, where Ansel Adams grew up and first developed his love of nature.


Watch Michael's film >> .

In Michael's own words, here's what inspired him to make this film:

This video project is a celebration of the shared legacy between Ansel Adams, the legendary American Artist/Conservationist & Lobos Creek, the last free flowing creek in the whole San Francisco peninsula, which has a source to sea run of just over a mile. I choose to use the the lens of how Lobos Creek shaped Ansel Adams life (art & environmental activism) , as a way of connecting people to the real message of the project: inspiring people to leave their own legacy of activism ; ie. discovering, volunteering, protecting/ rehabilitating, and then ultimately sharing and inviting others to discover the river system for themselves. Simply put - if that discovery or connection is made, then folks can care about the issue and there is hope for restoring & protecting our vital watersheds.

While Lobos Creek is somewhat protected by being located in the Presidio National Park, - it's a microcosm of the physical and social features that effect any large water shed around the nation including unspoiled beautiful areas, political ranging over water rights (Lobos Creek happens to be the emergency back up water supply for the entire city) and the urbanization of the stream-bed (ie. it runs alongside a city neighborhood, it has a dam, it crosses under a main road, has a large portion of its flow taken for human consumption and goes into a pipe for 500' of its last leg of the journey to the ocean). Legal protection only goes so far, it still needs helping hands to care for it and acute minds that care for its future with regards to development pressures (especially in National Parks!). That's why I choose to make a space for others to discover the creek in the same way that I did, by seeing/touching it, so that they can start to claim it for their own.

But for all that, it still maintains the wildness that inspired Ansel Adams (and other like me!) to see the rich beauty in the natural world. This was the foundation of Adams world and he credits this little creek valley for making him the artist and the conservationist that he became. Put it this way - Lobos Creek didn't need Ansel Adams to fulfill its destiny as a rich, unique ecosystem, but Ansel sure needed Lobos Creek to fulfill his. Which is lucky for the rest of us, because Adams was a solid environmentalist (even before the word was coined) and helped to protect the wild American landscape with the power of his images that captured the essence of nature for an adoring public. What John Muir did for Teddy Roosevelt (made him love Yosemite and protect it), Ansel Adams did for the rest of the country with his awe inspiring visions of our National Parks.

So in essence, I would argue that Lobos Creek was the midwife for Ansel Adams dedication to conserving the environment, and for that reason should get a lot of the credit for helping to preserve the many wild places in the American West, that Ansel's photos and activism helped to protect. For that, we all owe small, humble, urban, Lobos Creek - a big thank you.

Good art can make this personal connection for people much better than the typical educational format I've seen of: "hey look- I just picked up some trash"...and so should you" (for the record - I pick up plenty of trash, but that doesn't typically inspire others to join in). Ansel Adams's art/photo work is probably the best example of this theory in action, so when I discovered that he grew up on this creek and that he said it gave him his foundation ; I knew that was the hook that I thought would work best to inspire others to act. Now I'm no Ansel Adams, but I did the best I could to show the beauty there (even if it is hard to see after YouTube got done mangling the visual quality!) , so I hope this video imparts some of the magic in my local creek to the rest of you.

So come visit Lobos Creek to see it for yourself, (sing it now: ...this creek is your creek, this creek is my creek from California to the... ) and lend a helping hand to keep it protected and pristine! If I'm available - I'll give anyone who responds to this video an official walking tour!

Enjoy!
Michael Stewart