More Rockridge Rocks

Lately I’ve returned to Upper Rockridge in search of the elusive Rockridge Rock. On Bowling Drive I captured this view of Cactus Rock, which perches high above Acacia Avenue. (A reader took the same photo in July 2008.)

Cactus Rock is impressive, but I still have trouble believing that picnic parties would come up there regularly; it’s 1000 feet and almost a 200-foot climb from Broadway Terrace. The climb to “Mount Ararat” would have been shorter; but I still lack evidence that a large rock sits up there.

That leads me to 5920 Broadway Terrace, where the owners have recently finished a major upgrade to the grounds revealing some very impressive rocks. (A commenter mentioned it last year.)

Click the photo for a larger view. You can’t quite see it, but the rock beneath the porch now has a fountain installed that spills in a waterfall over it into a pool. Could this house be sitting on the original Rockridge Rock?

Chabot gorge

As you walk up to Chabot Dam the valley carved by San Leandro Creek opens up below, and it’s quite impressive (click photo for bigger version):

At the top, the dam is buttressed against a ridge of the volcanic rock of Leona Quarry. Before the dam was built, there must have been quite a defile here:

The rock is nicely exposed just next to the dam, worth taking a close look at:

The gorge is more than 100 meters deep and only a couple hundred meters wide. Like other Oakland stream valleys, it seems large for the stream running through it today. I think much of the hardest work carving the canyons was done during periods of much wetter climate than today. Or maybe it was drier, with the land being more prone to desert-style flash floods.

What makes the Bay?

We all admire the Bay when we visit high places, whether it’s here at Dunsmuir Ridge (click for a 2X version) or elsewhere in the Oakland Hills. But why is there such a big basin here?

One ready answer comes when you contemplate the major faults, the San Andreas and the Hayward, that bound the bay on the west and east sides respectively. They aren’t quite parallel, but fan slightly apart as you progress to the north. As the crust moves along these faults, the part between would sink, just like what happens at the smaller scale when a sag basin forms. Maybe it does. Why, then, are the Oakland Hills still rising from compression across the Hayward fault? Well, maybe things shift direction slightly from time to time and the sense of stress across the fault changes. So today we have compression while other times we have extension. But maybe the analogy of sag basins is the wrong one.

Geologists have the same question when we consider the Great Valley, that vast trough between the Sierra and the Coast Range. Most sedimentary basins are depressed by their load of sediments, but not to the point of lying at sea level like the Great Valley. The current working hypothesis about the Great Valley is that it’s a captured slab of oceanic lithosphere, a dense bottom layer, with thick sediments on top. It naturally, persistently rides lower than the continental rocks around it. Might the San Francisco Bay basin be a chunk of the same slab? That’s one hypothesis; we don’t really know.

The roots of the Bay are pretty deep for active-source seismic imaging, the kind of technique used at the Garrido property in Antioch to study a crime scene. The Bay is also pretty small for the passive-source seismic studies used to study the crust and mantle at the regional and continental scale. If you gave me a few million dollars, I could make a stab at an investigation, but no one can spare that for an idle question. So we’ll keep wondering as we stand on the high places.

Cemetery Creek canyon Moraga Canyon

The valley of Glen Echo Creek, “Mountain View Valley,” is much larger than the current creek has the power to excavate. This is especially apparent at its head end, above Mountain View Cemetery where the creek is also known as Cemetery Creek. In this view (click it for a larger version), the valley is a steep-sided, tree-filled dogleg, almost a gorge, with homes perched high above a landfilled floor and Moraga Avenue running through it. I think of it as Cemetery Creek Canyon. The Google map below gives a feeling of how odd the canyon is, almost a box canyon with no sizeable watershed to feed it.

UPDATE: By the way, a story in the paper referred to this as Moraga Canyon, so I should probably call it that too, even though Moraga itself is way over the mountain. Once upon a time, Moraga Road did go to Moraga.

View Larger Map

I wonder if, like Dimond Canyon, there is an explanation that involves a beheaded watershed from movement on the Hayward fault. The rock at the valley head, above the narrowest spot at Maxwellton Road, is Franciscan mélange, which is not an especially rigid rock. A bit of compression across the fault might squeeze it up, like clay in the hand. I don’t have a way to test this hypothesis, with rock exposures so scarce there, but the idea tickles me every time I look here.

Dunsmuir Ridge and the Irvingtonian gravels

Just northwest of Lake Chabot are some tiny areas mapped as “Irvington Gravels,” high above the Sheffield Village neighborhood in the Dunsmuir Ridge Open Space. They caught my eye because Irvington (part of present-day Fremont) is the site of a famous set of Ice Age fossils, from which the Irvingtonian age of North American land mammals was established. Yesterday I checked the area out, in case there were some sabertooth-cat fangs lying around. This entry has a lot of photos.

You get there starting at the access at the end of Covington Road, a dirt fire road that goes straight up a steep hillside. The Hayward fault crosses the road partway up, at a little level spot at the edge of the woods. To the west of the fault, the rocks are mapped as San Leandro gabbro (Jurassic rocks of the Coast Range Ophiolite), but it’s really hard to tell:

Across the fault the rocks change to Late Jurassic volcanic rocks of the Great Valley Sequence, the same stuff exposed in the big Leona quarry:

Higher up are three small terraces where the gravel is mapped. This is looking south from the northernmost one:

It looks like a hopeless task to find rocks here. Luckily for me, the fire roads have recently been graded, so there was a window into the substrate. As I approached the terraces, the roadbed started to display river cobbles, quite unexpected in this setting:

I made a point of crossing the grassy slope to the other two terraces, looking for stones the whole way. Nada. From the southernmost terrace, here’s the view north. Click on the picture for a stereopair:

There’s a house on a knoll at the same height as the terraces. The upper part of the Knowland Park Zoo land also lines up with the terraces. No gravel is mapped at either place, but there might be some.

Now the cobbles in the roadbed start to look interesting:

Above is another, higher terrace. It’s over 500 feet above the starting point and a bit of a trudge.

Just below it are scattered outcrops of the volcanic bedrock:

The roadbeds on the upper terrace also have interesting cobbles. I took a few home to clean up and photograph. Remind me to bring them back on my next visit.

Russ Graymer, who prepared the Oakland geologic map, describes the suite of cobbles thus: “Cobbles . . . consist of about 60 percent micaceous sandstone, 35 percent metamorphic and volcanic rocks and chert probably derived from the Franciscan complex, and 5 percent black laminated chert and cherty shale derived from the Claremont Formation.” He holds that these little terraces started out near Fremont and were carried here by the Hayward fault. They started out at a much lower elevation too, I would think; just a sign that fault movements are not straightforward.

View of “Mount Ararat”

One of the geologic puzzles I worked on during 2008 was the identity of “Rockridge Rock.” One candidate is a crag along Acacia Avenue once known as Cactus Rock; another candidate is an outcrop that supposedly was dynamited away in the early 1900s. I’m reluctant to accept either as the true Rockridge Rock without better evidence. In the meantime I’m intrigued by the hillock called “Mt Ararat” on an old map of the area. It’s topped with a bedrock eminence that’s almost completely hidden by homes and trees, but if you remove those (and there’s good historical reason to do that) I think what’s left is a legitimate candidate. This summer, while exploring the ground north of Mountain View Cemetery, I got a fair shot of the hill. Click the photo for a larger view.

I’ve been too busy to carry my search further lately, but I haven’t given up.

Thrust and fold

The same day I was up at Redwood looking for the bent trees, I ran across this fine example of a thrust fault right next to the Huckleberry Botanic Reserve.

Today I finally got around to putting it in my gallery at About.com—not as a thrust fault (I already have a good one), but as an example of a drag fold. Looks pretty good there, almost textbook quality. But here’s a secret: look at this view of the fault.

I can’t figure out what the double curvature means! I can’t figure out the relationship of the fault to the folds. I feel like a freshman in his first field course. A real geologist would crawl all over this, including the hillside on top, until everything was clear. But I tell myself, the key to being a good scientist is to admit when you’re mystified because enlightenment comes that way. A certain set of people can visualize things ten times as complicated, and I hope one of them will pipe up.

By the way, my spread about Oakland’s geology is in the new Oakbook, the printed one. Go get one for free.