This Might Be Our Favorite Bay Area Picture of 2022

It’s an image that looks almost as if it was painted — a couple, veiled by umbrellas, with towering redwoods silhouetted by a hazy dew.

The San Francisco Bay Area has seen historic levels of rain over the past week. People have literally kayaked in roads; highways were submerged; the parklet that belonged to The Wooden Nickel floated down Folsom Street; water in the garage at Samuel Picazo’s apartment at 17th and Folsom streets reached well above his ankles — a level of water that Picazo has seen inundate his space dozens of times over the past 50 years, though it still is a wonder why the City didn’t properly install flood boundaries prior to the predicted deluge.

Worse off? The impending atmospheric river that’s expected to start coming down Wednesday could become the single-wettest day in San Francisco’s history.

But before all this needed rainfall collected in dangerous amounts, Bay Area-based shutterbug Stuart Berman photographed two individuals on New Years Eve day walking shoulder-to-shoulder as they hiked the Marin Headlands amid a light drizzle.

“Rainy day stroll,” Berman captioned on an Instagram post about the picture. The pair can be seen walking down a dirt path with Karl The Fog obscuring Mother Nature in the background. Tall Marin County flora tower over the two, dwarfing their presence. The gorgeous picture sits as another example of how there are indefensible amounts of beauty nestled in and around the Golden Gate Bridge.

However, it’s become increasingly clear as of late that rain can, in fact, ruin the proverbial parade of optimism. At least we’ll have sublime stills like this to help us wade through this wet weather — TBD on when that’ll be, tbh.

2 Comments

  • FYI: Those are towering Eucalyptus trees in the photo – not redwoods. Redwoods are not native to SF anyway – so the the Eucs and the redwoods are both transplants (just like so many of the rest of us).

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