I finally got to a sweet corner of town last week, the sunny side of Dunsmuir Ridge, this lovely hill in the Google Maps 3D view.
The view is to the north-northwest, such that the Hayward fault runs straight up about a thumb’s width from the left edge. The maps below start with the 1915 topo map, in which the ridge’s top is the lobed outline of the 625-foot contour.
That straight creek valley along the hill’s south side — the gorge in the foreground of the top image — keeps catching my eye, but it seems to be inaccessible, which might make it Oakland’s wildest piece of land. The watershed map below may help in visualizing the hill and its surroundings. The two black dots are where the fire trail I took starts and ends.
Dunsmuir Ridge is city land, rescued from development after several aborted attempts to put high-end estates on this broad hilltop overlooking (in both senses) the deadly Hayward fault. The fire trail starts at the end of Cranford Way and winds up the ridge to join the fire road from the other side, which I’ve featured here before.
The walk is very scenic. To the north, downtown rises against Mount Tam.
Or if you prefer, there’s the new profile of San Francisco.
Higher up, the view opens out. Here San Leandro Creek is made visible as a line of trees coming out of the canyon toward its mouth near the airport.
But the main attraction is to the south. This is the best place to take portraits of Fairmont Ridge and its quarry scar. Unlike most places, this trail sets off the hill with a foreground of wild, forested land.
The prominent cleared space midway up the trail — a staging pad for firefighters — has regular visitors who find the spot special.
Interestingly, this spot is mapped as a patch of the peculiar Irvington-aged gravel that first brought me to Dunsmuir Ridge in 2009. However, I didn’t notice much of it, if any. See it on the geologic map — the white dots mark the ends of the fire trail.
There are rocks to be seen too. The soil is thin in most places. This little cut displays a profile of the soil and the decaying bedrock — saprolite — just beneath it.
The bedrock varies, and it doesn’t match the geologic map very closely. I would say nearly all of the lower part is not Leona volcanics (Jsv) but San Leandro Gabbro (gb). It has the gabbro’s pepper-and-salt appearance but is stained orange instead of the pristine rock’s bluish gray (as I saw earlier that day in San Leandro). You’ll see it well exposed in the trail itself, where this winter’s heavy rains carved fresh runnels.
If the city fills them before you get there (which it should before they become gullies), there are still roadside exposures that display the rock well, and it’s unmistakably gabbro where the map says volcanics. The top of the hill, though, is unquestionably Leona volcanics.
My long-term plan is to revisit every bit of bedrock in Oakland and log it. Besides sheer nerdery and the chance to improve the map, my motive is to come back to views like this one over and over again.
The old quarry is still for sale. Developers have tried to put houses there, but they keep getting shot down. Better, I say, for the Regional Parks District to acquire the land and develop it for quiet recreation.
Oakland Geology 
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