Oakland Geology

Some of Oakland’s most interesting land is also its most inaccessible; I’m speaking of our streambeds. And on the whole, the largest remaining stretches of wild streambed belong to Arroyo Viejo. Just to orient you, here’s the Arroyo Viejo watershed, as it’s mapped today by the Alameda County Flood Control District. The red stripe, which I added, represents the Hayward fault. (I’ll return to that.)

Here’s a zoom-in to the lower right corner, showing the upper part of Arroyo Viejo and the valley of a defunct little stream that I’m calling Arroyo Viejito.

The peculiar feature that caught my eye several years ago is how Arroyo Viejito runs parallel to Arroyo Viejo, very close to it, with a distinct rocky ridge between the two streams. Today the two valleys are very different, and a century’s worth of maps hints at what happened. Here’s the 1897 topo map showing the two streams, underneath the word “Viejo.”

In 1915, the area was more accurately mapped, and the two streams are shown as extremely close together at one point.

Everything changed after this. The country club was expanded and the adjoining land was subdivided and developed into the very exclusive Sequoyah district starting in the early 1920s. At that time Golf Links Road was pushed through to what would become the Grass Valley district in the 1950s, and Arroyo Viejito was diverted into the large stream at their closest approach and a sewer line inserted into the abandoned valley. It was very handy for the developers. As of 1947, the little stream had vanished and the land lay open for a new wave of luxury homes.

As of 1980 the buildout around Arroyo Viejito was complete.

The sewer line is accompanied by a maintenance road that is now a nice place for the locals to walk, and it connects with the little-visited creek trail at the north edge of the zoo’s property. I featured this area, in passing, three years ago in Ramble 3.

The reason these two streams ran so close together is related to the Hayward fault. It’s been dragging the lower, western half of Arroyo Viejo north, and for the last few hundred thousand years the stream has stretched out along the fault line before turning toward the Bay. Models of landscape evolution suggest that the headwater streams have been getting squeezed, aligning themselves and crowding together.

The combination of an especially large earthquake and a major flood could cause Arroyo Viejito to break through the narrow waist and join Arroyo Viejo farther upstream, abandoning the stretch with the sewer line and leaving the ridge standing there for a few more thousand years until it erodes away. But impatient developers have short-circuited all of that, and now the little stream is defunct, its former catchment part of a sterile golf course.

As I said, it was the ridge between the two streams that caught my eye and dared me to set foot on it. It’s in the middle of this Google Earth view looking west.

Its sides are very steep; it’s like an island. One day I found that it has a tiny trail running along its top, and signs of an old road and excavations. My guess is that the ridge was dug up for fill material when the sewer line was put in. The high-resolution lidar data acquired along the Hayward fault a few years back covers the west half of the ridge, and the resulting digital elevation model (with the trees and buildings stripped away) shows these features plainly.

Lately I’ve visited this ridge and the stream valleys of both Arroyos, in search of access and ultimately in search of rocks. Access beyond what I’ve already mentioned is difficult, and I have paid dearly for it in poison-oak rash. But I shall return.

The bedrock map looks like this, but I am suspicious of all of it given the difficulty of access and the paucity of outcrops. One big goal of mine has been to inspect the stream bed where bedrock might be exposed, for some real ground truth. I suspect that geologists, while doing their best, have resorted to drawing lines based on the topography.

The green zone marked KJk is shale and conglomerate of the Knoxville Formation, and that’s what I’ve always found in the eastern chunk of it. This shale is just west of Golf Links road where it crosses the creek.

And the conglomerate is abundant as loose boulders (not bedrock) downstream. It’s beautiful stuff.

But I have found none of it yet in the western section. Instead, everywhere I’ve looked the rock is either coarse sandstone shot with calcite veins, interpreted as the very oldest part of the Knoxville . . .

. . . or familiar rocks of the Leona volcanics (Jsv).

This includes up on the little ridge and down in the Arroyo Viejo streambed.

I still have a good bit of territory to visit, though. The streambed will have to wait until dry season, when I can poke around this weird-ass lime-cemented breccia.

And there’s more ridge to check out. Outcrops like this are so crusted with lichen that I might need to bring a rock hammer for some very careful, unobtrusive chipping.

There are some other charms in this northernmost stretch of Knowland Park. Every time I’ve visited there are fresh deer bones, indicating a mountain lion’s sphere of influence. And the cries of exotic animals occasionally drift down from the zoo’s hilltop center.

No other place in the world exactly like that.

This entry was posted on 6 January 2020 at 8:01 am and is filed under Hayward fault, Leona volcanics, Oakland conglomerate. 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.