Montgomery Ridge

St. Mary’s Cemetery, north of Mountain View Cemetery, is on a ridge that runs toward the bay and peters out at the Kaiser hospital on Macarthur and Broadway. The ridge is on bedrock at the high end and changes to old alluvial fan sediment just past Pleasant Valley Boulevard. I call it Montgomery Ridge because Montgomery Street runs approximately up its crest. My yard lies on the edge of this ridge down near its end. I find these Franciscan chert cobbles scattered thinly in the dirt, and I’ve been putting them aside. They are rough, but not jagged, so I take them to be natural, in-situ alluvium rather than fill or crushed rock. That’s where things stood until the other week, when I found a cutbank on upper Howe Street dug into the ridge, and the same chert was tumbling out of the hillside from a layer just beneath the topsoil. Walking down Montgomery, I saw more chert chunks in the soil by the road at the corner of John Street. My favorite pieces are the greenish ones, like this one by the side of upper Howe Street.

This chert comes from the Piedmont block, but the geography is different today. Today, streams have incised the old fan and they’re too feeble to carry this kind of material. I picture much drier conditions, and flash floods strewing the chert across the surface of the ancient fan. The next thing is to see where else it occurs. Let me know if you find it in your neighborhood.