Oakland Geology

The Gold Rush was a bust everywhere in the Oakland Hills, with one exception. That was a short-lived mine, started in 1864, on A. D. Pryal’s ranch in the northern Rockridge neighborhood. This seems most unlikely at first blush, but the source is Titus Fay Cronise’s unimpeachable book The Natural Wealth of California (1868):

“In 1864, Mr. A. D. Pryal, owner of a large ranch about four miles east from Oakland, discovered a vein of auriferous quartz in the Contra Costa hills, which cross his lands. Some of the specimens from this vein were rich in free gold, and the mine opened under the name Temescal, paid well for a short time, but the dislocation of the strata, a little below the surface, rendered its further working unprofitable.”

The only remotely likely source for such an ore is a small body of highly altered mantle material, called silica-carbonate rock (also called listwanite or listvenite), that was caught up in the Hayward Fault. Long-time readers may recall a post of mine on the subject that involved this same locality. Here’s what the area looks like on the geologic map.

That’s College Avenue running up the left side and Route 24 in purple running along the bottom, with Chabot Road to its immediate north; Lake Temescal is in the corner and the silica-carbonate is the dark blue wedge just north of it between strands of the Hayward fault. When I explored it nine years ago, I bushwhacked up its western edge and found nothing. This weekend, I bushwhacked up its eastern edge.

This part of town has been heavily built upon since Pryal first dug it up, but old photos from (I think) the 1890s show the possibilities. The first shows the Lake Temescal dam and the creek below the spillway. What would’ve been the continuation of Chabot Road (then known as Pryal Lane) runs in front of the white house at the left. The little bridge at the bottom is where the next photo is.

Notice what a mess the hillside is above the dam. Anthony Chabot apparently sluiced it all into the reservoir when he built the dam in 1868. And notice what an erosional mess the streambed is. Nobody cared back then, or nobody downstream cared enough to sue Chabot.

^{Photos courtesy Bancroft Library via Online Archive of California}

What caught my eye was the boulder at center left. Well, first, the streambank behind it looks like fault gouge, the pale powdery dirt that faults make by grinding rocks (and which I documented down at the London Road landslide). Anyway, the boulder at center left looks just like a big slickenside, the scraped-and-buffed surface that faults make by rubbing rocks.

The gist of all this is that a wide, complex fault zone like the geologic map shows could very easily carry slivers of rock from quite far away. And this is little known today, but in the early days there were curious, isolated reports of stones of gold-bearing quartz in our hills. At least two have popped up in my reading, one from north Berkeley and another from Leona Heights. So my hopes were not high as I set out on this traverse, but they weren’t zero either.

It was a real nice day. The streams had water and the ground was pretty firm and quiet. This is looking down at the head of Chabot Road, which was truncated by the freeway long ago. A strand of the fault is mapped there, but the road shows no sign of it.

I found bedrock this time. One bit was deeply weathered Leona volcanics, the same stuff that crops out uphill to the east (pink on the map).

This outcrop looked more like a strongly sheared and altered basalt, not unexpected in the Leona volcanics.

This outcrop, hard to tell; probably more of the same, brecciated.

None of what I saw appeared to be silica-carbonate rock or even leaning in that direction. But that’s what I would expect 160 years after a minor gold find petered out. I’m still not clear on what evidence led the mappers to think such a thing was here at all.

Besides, I was happy to find real bedrock at all during this visit, and there’s still a bit of the territory I haven’t set foot on yet — something for another day. After a long absence from the field, these rocks all looked beautiful to me anyway.

This entry was posted on 3 January 2022 at 8:01 am and is filed under Hayward fault, Quarries and mines. 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.