In keeping with its mission of providing access to contemporary water-related materials, the Water Resources Center Archives (WRCA) is presenting an exhibit of color photographs of a Northern California wetlands restoration site near Vallejo.

The photos in the exhibit were taken by Sally Mack at a 53-acre wetlands restoration site owned by CalTrans, developed by a consortium of federal and state resource agencies. Named “Guadalcanal Village” after the South Pacific Island, it’s the site of a failed Navy housing development, now a CalTrans mitigation site (it is bordered by Highway 37 and the Napa River). Within a few years it is slated to become part of the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Although Sally has lived in the Bay Area since 1977, she grew up in the Sonora Desert in Arizona to which she attributes, in part, her fascination with wetlands and marshes. Wetlands seem exotic, the plants that live in them, the birds that use them, and the amphibians that cannot live anywhere else. Water seems exotic, the ways in which it reacts, absorbs, and reflects light, the way it ebbs and flows with the tides, the way plants sway with its movement, the way that sounds travel over and through it. The beauty is everywhere, the mud, the plants, the water, the reflections, and the plants growing under water, in all weather, in all seasons.