We reached a milestone today: we have now been to all of the Santa Clara County Parks. We went to the last two today, which were both reservoirs. The first stop of the day was Chesbro Reservoir. When we first spotted the reservoir, we wondered if there was going to be any water at all. We weren’t able to see any until we got pretty close to the actual parking lot. It was sad to see the water level so low, but we did manage to hike to every interesting feature that was normally underwater. We hiked all around the perimeter of the water, with most of our path in what would normally be the reservoir.

This was all the water left in the reservoir. You can see how high the water used to be if you look at the banks.

Most of the bottom of the reservoir looked like this. It was interesting to walk on.

This bridge is normally underwater. We guessed that it used to go over a creek before the dam was built.
We then drove on to Uvas Reservoir, which was also very low. We found a parking lot that appeared to be right at the edge of the reservoir during wetter times and walked down to the water. On the way, we passed another bridge that looked very similar and was also usually underwater. This reservoir seemed to be on a more active stream as the “dry” mud wasn’t very dry at all and we had to walk along areas that had been dry for a lot longer. Lloyd skipped stones here for a while before we called our trip a success and headed home.

The view of Uvas Reservoir from the parking lot. It was a bit longer walk than usual to the water.

Lloyd skipping stones by the water.
Both reservoirs looked as though they would be OK parks if the water was higher. There were no paths and not much land in either of the parks. However, the water was so low that there was plenty of room to walk. It was an interesting experience, but sad that the water level was really that low.