Jean Quan

SCOTT RUSSELL lives 10 blocks from Temescal Creek, but Saturday morning, up to his arms in mud, pulling weeds and debris from the creek, he said he was happy to make the trip.

"We've done the same thing on 41st Street. It looks a lot better now," Russell said.

Temescal Creek looks spiffier too. So do a number of other creeks throughout the city -- thanks to Russell and nearly 1,200 other volunteers who turned out Saturday.

The occasion was the City of Oakland's ninth annual creek cleanup.

At Temescal Creek,. behind the Department of Motor Vehicles office at 5300 Claremont Ave., volunteers lined the creek, pulling up weeds and debris and digging out the channel.

Kristin Hathaway and Felicia Verdin of the Oakland public works department said there were cleanups Saturday at 20 locations, in-

cluding Lake Merritt.

In addition, teams of volunteers from the Unity Council, East Bay Asian Youth Center and Alpha Omega walked down International Boulevard stenciling signs on storm drains explaining that anything dumped in the drain goes straight into San Francisco Bay.

In the Fruitvale area, signs saying "No dumping, drains to the Bay" were stenciled in both Spanish and English, Verdin said. Storm drains through most of Oakland now have similar warnings, she said.

Historically, Oakland was divided by 15 major creeks, including Temescal on the north, Glen Echo, Indian Gulch, Sausal, Lion, Peralta, Arroyo Viejo and San Leandro Creek on the south. Each flowed from sources high in the Oakland hills to San Francisco Bay or the Oakland estuary.

"We know we have 40 miles of creeks above ground, but another 40 miles or more are buried in culverts," Hathaway said.

Thanks to creek cleanup projects, most Oakland creeks can no longer be found by looking for abandoned, upended shopping carts sticking out of creek beds, she said.

In fact, Oakland placed, but did not win, a state Coastal Commission contest for the weirdest thing taken out of a park or off a shoreline. Oakland's creekbed finds included a tombstone for a cat -- complete with an epitaph, Hathaway said.

It was no match for the note in a bottle from a Russian sailor found on a shoreline, she said

Contests aside, volunteer work on the city's creeks is a labor of love.

One of the showcases is Sausal Creek, which begins in Joaquin Miller Park in the Oakland hills and flows through Dimond Park near Fruitvale Avenue east of the MacArthur Freeway, emptying into the Oakland estuary near the Fruitvale Bridge.

On Saturday, a band of volunteers labored on the creek at the upper end of Dimond Park where the creek emerges from its canyon.

Restoration of the creek has been an ongoing project since 1996, said Kristin Hopper of Friends of Sausal Creek.

"We do habitat restoration to help wildlife," she said. "In Dimond Park the creek was invaded by non-native plants like ivy."

It has been replaced by plants like snowberry and wild rose and flowering currant, she said.

Two years ago, the city and creek boosters made a major effort to restore the natural channel, engineering curves and small pools and pulling out concrete, Hopper said. "Friends of the creek planted 20,000 native plants and they've done well," she said.

Hopper said she was drawn to the creek because it's a living pocket of wilderness in the middle of an urban area. "It's a place for wildlife to survive and we want to protect and enhance this natural resource," she said.

A long-term goal for her group is to create a greenway along the creek from the Oakland hills to the estuary, Hopper said.