Oakland Geology

Walk number 26 in Charles Fleming’s Secret Stairs East Bay traverses Longridge and its neighbor Calmar ridge, sticking to the paths and stairways. It doesn’t really give you the full experience of the ridges themselves (I plan to make posts for each), but it’s still fun to learn the local shortcuts. Here’s the route map on Google Maps terrain.

You can see that Longridge Road and Calmar Avenue are both ridge roads, which are especially desirable for developers and homeowners because everyone gets a great view unless the downhill neighbors decide to plant redwoods here, where the habitat is wrong.

The geologic map shows that essentially all the route is in the Pleistocene alluvial fan or, as I’m starting to think of it, the Fan.

The walk starts at the fine iron gateposts at the foot of Longridge Road. Locations of these photos are noted on the geologic map.

You ascend the ridge along its gently but persistently sloping crest, then sidestep into the private Oak Grove Park along its northern flank. The view here gives a glimpse of Mandana valley, between the two ridges, and the high spine of the Oakland Hills.

Most of the path is quite secluded, though. This entire neighborhood started out as grassland, like most of Oakland.

At the other end of the park is steep Paloma Avenue, providing good views of Calmar ridge across Mandana valley.

And here’s Mandana Boulevard, running down the floor of its stream valley. The creek here is entirely culverted and appears never to have merited its own name, probably because it was seasonal.

Now comes the hardcore stairway portion of the walk, straight up the flank of Calmar ridge and over its top down to Balfour Avenue, shown here. The stairway here is quite hinky, which distracts from the view of Grizzly Peak over the north end of the Piedmont bedrock block.

Another stairway takes you down to Walavista Avenue, running up its own valley. At the street’s upper end you hop over a subtle divide into the valley of a tributary to Wildwood Creek, traversed by a quiet, funky little path that butts onto another path connecting Carlston and Portal avenues as a continuation of Santa Ray Avenue. In 1912, this valley was a Key Route line.

You take the right hook onto Carlston and back down across Mandana valley, ready to climb Longridge again. The little pocket park across Mandana, on the right, is a good place to kick back on a bench.

The route takes a jog along Paramount Road, which happens to occupy the crest of the ridge here while Longridge Road is a little off to the side of its namesake. At the far end of Paramount, where the Fan leaves off and the Piedmont block begins, the terrain starts to change and Longridge peters out as a proper ridge. Right on the geologic line is the Crocker Highlands Elementary School.

From here the route goes along the south slope of Longridge and its stairways. This is part of the Trestle Glen neighborhood, but I don’t think of it as part of the glen itself, that is, Indian Gulch. Keep an eye out for views like this, from Longridge Road near the end of the walk.

Winter is a good time to take this walk, while the leaves are down. Here’s the detailed route map (click it to see full size).

Fleming calls this walk “Trestle Glen and Lakeshore Highlands.” The part of this neighborhood north of Mandana was developed as East Piedmont Heights.

This entry was posted on 31 December 2012 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Oakland geology walks, the Fan. 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.