The lower end of Skyline Boulevard offers a tantalizing glimpse of the wilderness right next door. This post has large images, so I encourage you to click on them.
When you look east from most of Oakland’s highest hills, the center of attention is Mount Diablo. You can drive there and drive up and it’s a wonderful place. From the southernmost end of the hills, though, Diablo is hidden by Rocky Ridge.
Rocky Ridge reaches just over 2000 feet elevation and forms the west side of Bollinger Canyon, in Las Trampas Regional Wilderness. Between here, at the city stables just north of Keller Road, and Rocky Ridge lies Grass Valley, with its patches of grass and a power line running up it; then a darker, more distant ridge on the other side of Upper San Leandro Reservoir. From there to Rocky Ridge is an untrammeled area of mixed woods and fields and chapparal that’s East Bay MUD watershed land.
The ridge is about 5 miles away in a straight line but more like 8 miles on foot. With a permit, you can walk there but you can’t bike and you can’t camp. In a word, reaching that land from here is a pretty extreme challenge. You could reach it from the other side if you’re up for an 800-foot-plus climb out of Bollinger Canyon.
It’s so near, yet so remote.
Here’s the geology: fairly young sedimentary rocks, of late Miocene age (roughly 10 to 5 million years old), deeply folded to create dramatic exposures on Rocky Ridge’s flank. Don’t worry about all the symbols and labels, they’re significant only to a few specialists.
The photo is taken from the lower left corner where it says “Ko” (for the Oakland Conglomerate) and points toward the upper right corner. In the upper right quadrant, that set of stripes with the heavy line on its right edge represents the package of rocks making up the ridge, and the heavy line marks a thrust fault along which those rocks have been uplifted.
To help you visualize what the map is showing, the map includes a cross section of these rocks, drawn along that straight diagonal line near the top left. The point labeled B’ corresponds to the same point on the cross section, below.
Is your brain stretched to breaking yet? No? You may have the makings of a geologist.
For a much easier experience, hike in Grass Valley instead. That’s not watershed land, because it drains into Chabot Reservoir; instead it’s in the northern part of Anthony Chabot Regional Park, where only the locals go, and is as peaceful as can be. Some day I’ll post about it.
Oakland Geology 
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