I see that I haven’t given my photos of this interesting feature their own page. They show some dramatic load casts on the south side of Shepherd Canyon, near the east end of Escher Drive. A load cast is made when heavy material, like a mudflow, crosses soft sediment and sinks its feet into it.
My most memorable lesson about features of this kind happened in 2008 during a visit to Point Reyes. The path leading to the lighthouse passes a chaotic scene that most visitors ignore.
The scene was an offshore basin, probably like the offshore Monterey Canyon today, where every now and then an undersea debris flow, full of gravel and sand, fell rudely upon nice quiet beds of deep-sea clay or soft mud. The results included scour marks . . .
and rip-up clasts, hunks of (easily eroded) clay swept into the flow . . .
and downward-pushing load casts accompanied by upward-pointing flame structures.
It was a great pleasure to come upon high-quality load casts in the Oakland Hills, in the mudstones of the Shephard Creek Formation, and lead group walks past them. Here’s the overall scene, photographed in February 2016. A thick layer of massive (i.e., unbedded) sandstone overlies thin-bedded shale and mudstone.
Near the base of the sandstone, on the lower right side, are these well-exposed load casts.
The previous June, I took a closeup of the underside.
Unfortunately, a Google Maps image from January 2021 appears to show that this feature has crumbled off the roadcut. That’s how geology goes in the Oakland Hills, and that’s one reason I constantly take photos. I also tell myself, in consolation, that new examples could appear on any given day.
The classic 1995 text Sedimentographica has good photos of these and many more features of sedimentary rocks. I treasure my hard copy, but maybe the publisher’s online version will outlast it. That one, YOU can enjoy.
Oakland Geology 
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