Searching for the Sobrante

A few weeks ago I went out looking for the Sobrante Formation, because it’s such a prominent rock unit in the Caldecott Tunnel. On the Oakland geologic map, it’s the tan unit labeled Tsm. This post features photos from the four numbered locations.

The Sobrante is mudstone, laid down in a shallow marine setting during Miocene time. It varies between shale and fine-grained sandstone. The west half of the new Caldecott Tunnel bore goes through it, and paleo work there has found abundant fossils of fish scales. It’s not a competent (strong) rock, so you won’t see it outside of roadcuts. That’s what I went looking for.

I started in Claremont Canyon because the map shows the Sobrante just touching the road there. But between the Claremont chert . . .

and this unnamed coarse sandstone . . .

I couldn’t see anything beneath the vegetation. So I struck out there. When I checked out the winding part of Tunnel Road, though, I had better luck. There were several roadcuts that displayed the Sobrante, though not especially well.

This is the mudstone close up, nicely laminated and fairly coherent.

But the unit is prone to collapse, as those of you who bike here may remember. A big washout a few years ago has since been repaired.

The third locality is on Thorndale Drive, a steep and narrow road heading down from north Elverton Drive. The rock is quite crumbly; indeed, the hillside may be moving. Here’s a closeup.

And just a little lower is a large exposure where the rock spalls off so often that vegetation can’t get a foothold.

If you can step out of the way of the shortcutting local drivers, this is a nice sheltered spot to study the unit.

But probably the most accessible roadcut is the fourth locality, along Skyline Boulevard between Snake and Shepherd Canyon roads.

This is the stuff I described a few years ago as punk shale.

The Sobrante continues southeast beyond the city line, a narrowing ribbon down Redwood Canyon. At the village of Canyon, the stream bed intersects the Sobrante and stays in it for a mile or so. It peters out in the Upper San Leandro watershed, and some day I’ll look for it down there.

Serpentine sanctuary

Serpentine Prairie is looking good these days. With a large portion of the land fenced off from dogs and people, and with the exotic trees removed, this strange ground is healing.

See the boulders romping in their new space.

The hills of Mountain View

A few years ago in this space I called Mountain View Cemetery “a manicured showcase of the lower Oakland hills.” While you’re visiting the dead, it is pleasant to lift your eyes to the hills and consider the living world.

The cemetery’s ground reflects its variety of bedrock geology, as shown on the geologic map.

The entrance area is young stream fill with a fringe of higher, older Pleistocene alluvium (Qpaf), then going outward and upward we have the Franciscan sandstone (Kfn) and then Franciscan melange (dark blue) with large enclaves of greenstone, or altered basalt (fg), and chert (fc) making up the highest hilltops. Their elevation corresponds with their resistance to erosion.

The result of this progression of materials is a concave hillslope, or a tilted natural amphitheater. And not only does that present clear sightlines to a range of landforms at a variety of distances, but the mountains of the Berkeley Hills also function as borrowed scenery beyond. All that is hard to gather into one photo, but we are all welcome to try.

“Mountain View” really should be spelled with two spaces between the words. The place is not just a view of mountains—although it is, to the east and across the bay to more mountains—it’s a mountain of views. Mountains and views. And Oakland has other examples all along its uplands.

Gudde Ridge

The basalt of the Moraga Formation is spectacularly exposed on both sides of Route 24 east of the Caldecott Tunnel. From along the highway you can get an excellent view of its makeup and structure, but this view from Radio Tower Hill shows how the rock unit makes up Gudde Ridge.

Click the photo for the 1000-pixel verson. Gudde Ridge runs just east of Round Top all the way down to Canyon Road, on the back side of Moraga. The town of Canyon is on its west flank. And it’s Moraga basalt the whole way. In this photo you can see the underlying Orinda Formation to the right of the basalt. It’s gray conglomerate as opposed to the red-brown basalt.

Davie quarry

Davie Tennis Stadium is a set of courts in a former quarry, administered by Oakland but situated within Piedmont. But what about the stone, you ask.

I haven’t checked the whole place out, but the exposures near the entrance display this dark chert or siliceous metashale. The quarry exploited the Novato Quarry terrane of the Franciscan complex, a large pod of which underlies Piedmont and its immediate surroundings. The terrane is mostly sandstone, but some fine-grained rocks occur in it too.

I’ll be leading a walk to this and three other Oakland quarries for the Oakland Urban Paths organization on February 11. Watch the OUP site for details.

Sandstone concretion, Joaquin Miller Park

This odd tumorous-looking thing, on a sandstone boulder in the Oakland Conglomerate in Joaquin Miller Park, is a concretion.

I’ve documented concretions in Oakland before, in rocks of the Great Valley Sequence and in the nameless unit of Eocene mudstone above Shephard Canyon. This concretion is unlike the other two in (I assume) not having a siliceous matrix like the first and not being finely layered like the second. I assume that this is a typical featureless ball of extra-strong mineralization that formed slightly before the rest of the rock lithified. (And on KQED Quest Science Blogs this week, I talk about other concretions in the Bay area and California.)

By the way, I visited the lower end of Joaquin Miller Park the other day, below the Woodminster area where the Miller cottage is, and finally saw my sign about the rocks of the park. I hope that people have gotten some benefit from it.

The Holy Names hematite workings

On the grounds of Holy Names College is a locality where the locals, before the Spanish moved in, would find and process the red mineral pigment of hematite.

Today it’s the setting of a toddlers’ playground, without a sign of its former prestige. Nearby is Oakland historical landmark 51, the George McCrea House and Indian Campground. McCrea was the prominent architect who designed the house, and I find nothing online about the Indians. I don’t know if these boulders are part of the historical landmark, but they aren’t being treated like one.

I visited the site a couple weeks ago accompanied by a rockhound and a geologist. The boulders have numerous pits, much like the ubiquitous mortars where the natives once ground acorns.

The material making up the boulders appears to be ancient colluvium cemented by abundant iron oxides. This cementation would not happen at the land surface. They sit on a shoulder of land near a deep ravine of the Lion Creek drainage, evidently exposed by erosion.

The site is not far from the former sulfur mine in the hills above Laundry Canyon, and I was told that other ironstone boulders occur in the neighborhood.

Hematite is an excellent orange-red stain, useful for face paint and similar decoration. There isn’t much around here.