Oakland Geology

Stonewall Road is a cute little curving street, cozy at the bottom and overbuilt at the top, just across Claremont Boulevard from the Claremont Resort. The street sits at the break in slope where the Hayward fault passes through, its northernmost appearance in Oakland. This view looks southward pretty straight down the fault, which runs along the hillside above the road and to the left of the hotel.

The nice new red-painted curbs hide the evidence, as so often happens in this town, but this photo to the north from 2001 shows how it used to look.

A stairway named Tanglewood Path runs west from the north end of the street, and it’s disrupted by aseismic creep near its top, although tree roots and landslip do their part as well.

If you come out Stonewall onto Claremont Boulevard and look for fault evidence, you don’t see it amid the cracking and wear-and-tear that normally accompanies a heavily trafficked asphalt road in a stream valley near steep soil-covered slopes. But this wall, on the north side of the road right where the fault should be, makes me think that it must be some sort of homage to the fault.

There is some more-organized cracking in the pavement behind the hotel. The fault goes onward along Alvarado Road, ducking briefly into a salient of Berkeley then crossing Tunnel Road straight toward Lake Temescal.

This entry was posted on 19 June 2008 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Hayward fault. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.