When I last featured Indian Gulch on this blog, it was about the easy part, mostly a stroll up Trestle Glen Road. It ended with this glimpse of the living Indian Gulch Creek, bounding down the rock slopes of the Piedmont crustal block on its way to culverted oblivion beneath the elegant Trestle Glen neighborhood.
Upper Indian Gulch lies within Piedmont and the west fringe of Montclair that looks down upon Piedmont. Nowhere is the creek up there accessible to passers-by; if you want to see it you have to buy a house whose lot includes it, or make friends with someone who owns such a house. You’ll have to imagine it running in the dark underneath the street, as it does along La Salle Avenue just above St. James Drive.
Here’s an overview of the upper creek from Google Maps terrain view. The creek has three branches; the west fork is the main branch. To be a stickler, that fork should properly be called Indian Gulch Creek and the other two are just tributaries. The old property line between the two middle Peralta ranchos ran up this valley, Vicente’s on the left and Antonio’s on the right. Later the same line separated the Oakland and Brooklyn Townships of Alameda County. Today neither the ranchos nor the townships are relevant any more, but the boundary influenced the pattern of land ownership a century ago as Oakland expanded its territory and developers shaped the outskirts.
A stroll here is a workout. Part of my Ramble 4, Uptown to Montclair, goes up the creek’s middle fork but the steepest part is pedestrian-unfriendly. Three years ago I featured an excursion into the valley of the east fork. That pretty much exhausts the possibilities in those two valleys. In the west branch, two dead-end roads will take you to the floor of the valley, though the creek is not accessible. Indian Gulch Road leads down from Glen Alpine Road, just above the word “West”:
And Calvert Court swoops from Blair Avenue down into the creek’s highest watershed, where Oakland’s most isolated properties lie.
Here and there, you can get a look at the bedrock under the watershed: sandstone and mudstone of the Franciscan Complex.
And it’s hard, on Piedmont’s winding streets, to grasp the contours of the land. This view across the middle fork at Hampton Park is about as good as it gets.
Really, the best experience of these headwaters is on the rim roads that encircle the watershed. They aren’t photogenic in ways that my camera have caught many times over the years, but the views glimpsed through the trees and past the homes have always pleased my eye.
Looking east-northeast up Hampton Road at Sea View is a good view of the high rim of the east branch, topped by Pershing Drive.
By all means visit Oakland’s best bedrock there.
And don’t miss Wood Drive, along the north rim, where this excellent outcrop of Franciscan metachert awaits.
Indian Gulch is a good candidate for a circumambulation.
Oakland Geology 
26 October 2020 at 12:00 pm
Thanks for another great article, Andrew!
it’s worth putting in a plug for the indigenous people after whom “Indian Gulch” was named, before the coming of the trestle and the real estate developers.
It was a village of the Huchiun Ohlone people who resided by the creek. My understanding is that their contemporary descendants are part of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Ohlone. Activists from this group are working to protect the remaining shellmound under the Spenger’s parking lot on 4th Street in Berkeley. They also have the Segorea Te Land Trust to repatriate land. Their youth program is working toward activating neglected Sequoia Point in Joaquin Miller Park as a cultural area.
— Amelia