Oakland Geology

As you walk up Broadway Terrace from Broadway, you pass the Claremont Country Club and its golf course, then reenter the residential area of Upper Rockridge. At the corner of Country Club Drive and Broadway Terrace is a bus stop and this marvelous stone wall.

The entire wall is faced with local rocks from the Franciscan mélange that underlies Piedmont and its surroundings: high-grade altered chert like this stone, greenstone, sandstone, serpentinite, radiolarian chert, basalt. It slows me down every time I pass. I don’t know where such an assortment was ever quarried. It seems more likely that the stone came from around the neighborhood, maybe even the lot itself. That is exceptional. The next lot also has a wall, but it’s a pale and homogeneous thing made of quarry rock, conventional and boring.

This entry was posted on 27 November 2010 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Franciscan rocks. 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.