Archive for the ‘Quarries and mines’ Category

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Rocks of the Bilger Quarry

6 July 2020

It’s been twelve years since I wrote about the former quarry where the Rockridge Shopping Center sits today. Except for the pond, the whole space has gotten a makeover and it’s time for a fresh look. But first, some nostalgia. Back in 2008 the 24-hour “Big Long’s” was still there. I used to shop there; it had everything.

And flanking it was the big old Safeway with more businesses between and beyond, and the bank in the far corner. I used to bank there.

All of this is now gone, and the site is under intermittent redevelopment. Decades ago this was a giant rock pit, active for more than 70 years, that for a long time was the largest rock quarry in Alameda County. It was started by the Oakland Paving Company in 1870, and the name of Frank Bilger was associated with the succession of enterprises that produced crushed rock here, so it’s usually referred to as the Bilger Quarry. (Bilger learned the trade from his father, a German immigrant, and he surely pronounced his name the German way with a hard G.)

Now the Long’s site is a big Safeway, and the old Safeway and bank buildings are part of an empty lot. Only the water-filled pit on the east side is unchanged, and the walls show no sign of decay, which is a very good thing because it’s right next to St. Mary Cemetery.

The whole quarry site occupies a small body of quartz diorite, an intrusive (meaning it didn’t erupt) igneous rock that’s unusual but not unheard-of for the Franciscan Complex. It’s mapped as the purplish blob in the center labeled “Kfgm.”

It happens to be excellent rock for industrial and engineering purposes. The Tribune in 1890 wrote, “The material used by the Oakland Paving Company is a crushed blue rock, a trap dyke that is practically indestructible, submitting without injury to the hardest usage for eight or ten years without repairs, and with proper care, such as any pavement requires, lasting three or four times longer.”

The east end of the quarry exposes the bluish stuff. This exposure, right behind the Safeway, also has flaky veins of calcite. It’s very tough — not that I’ve used a hammer on it lately, but after seeing lots of rock you get a feel for this.

The west side consists of a much lighter material, a bit coarser grained and slightly less durable.

Between them is a contact zone that I recall as being black and sheared, with mineralization that was probably iron-manganese oxides. It was covered up when the new Safeway went in and parts of the rock face were fixed up for safety. I took this photo in 2018 from the roof parking lot.

There’s chainlink netting on the rock face, just in case it decides to start crumbling onto the roadway.

You’re always cautious about building inside an abandoned quarry, because rocks don’t last forever — that’s why they’re mostly underground, covered with soil. The experts have assured us it’s OK, and I trust them pretty well. The cemetery will last a good long while, and the former California College of the Arts campus, while it looks precarious perched above the other side, has passed muster too and someday will be apartments with good views.

What continues to impress me, every time I visit, is how different Oakland used to be. Throughout the late 1800s, the cemetery on one side and the CCA site (then it was the Treadwell estate) on the other were cheek-by-jowl with this huge operation that blasted three times a day, starting at six in the morning, and employed hundreds of men in producing crushed rock. But back then, rocks were money.

Posted in Franciscan rocks, Quarries and mines | 5 Comments »

In search of lime

25 May 2020

I like to brag that Oakland contains more rock types within its boundaries than any other city in America. But alas, it’s missing one of America’s most widespread rock types: limestone. Yes, there are pods of dolomite limestone in the Claremont Shale, but that’s a far cry from what Oakland’s first outside settlers hankered for, which was real calcite limestone.

Limestone is essential for civilization because it’s the default industrial source of lime (calcium oxide or hydroxide), without which you can’t manufacture any kind of decent mortar, or plaster, or cement. Lime has been made for thousands of years by simply roasting limestone, which consists of the mineral calcite (calcium carbonate). This was traditionally done in a lime kiln, a stone furnace that was loaded with rock and firewood.

The Bay area does have bodies of limestone, and these were staked out early. But the nearby firewood supplies (i.e. forests) were soon depleted, and the industry was fitful and limited until reliable supplies of coal and, still later, oil became available.

One alternative to limestone in Oakland was oyster shells, which we once had in abundance. Unfortunately, many of the old Native shellmounds had oyster shells in abundance too, and this led to the end of them.

A few years ago I had the chance to visit the remains of an old-fashioned lime kiln in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Another old site was on the coast near Rockaway Beach, south of Pacifica. I wrote a piece about it for KQED a while back that explains where most of our local limestone comes from, tectonically speaking.

This kind of industry lasted only a few decades. Around the turn of the last century, big manufacturers started to mine massive bodies of limestone. One was on the Santa Cruz County coast at Davenport; it supported a company town out there for a whole century. Another was in the South Bay near Cupertino, based in a quarry on Permanente Creek. One of Henry J. Kaiser’s early companies operated it, and when Kaiser eventually became head of an industrial giant, during World War II he took the name Permanente for the name of his innovative company health-care plan. The quarry is still digging, almost 80 years later.


By Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA – Flickr.com – image description page, CC BY 2.0, from Wikipedia commons

Another big limestone quarry was in American Canyon, in Napa County. But the one that fascinates me most is the former Cowell lime quarry, which sits between Walnut Creek and Concord, on Lime Ridge. For about 40 years, starting in 1908, this quarry exploited a thick deposit of travertine — hot-spring limestone. It supported a company town too. Now some of the workings are in Lime Ridge Open Space, where you can scrutinize these unusual deposits. They aren’t like anything else around.

This post was inspired by my maniac brother Steve, who explores the woods around his Lyme, New Hampshire home to locate old cellar holes. Now he’s branched into old lime kilns.

In other news, I’m happy to report that the latest Covid-19 guidelines now allow the use of public transit for outdoor recreation. This means that all of my geology walks and rambles can be undertaken again, and I’m looking forward to getting out there, taking due care of course.

Posted in Other topics, Quarries and mines | 1 Comment »

Sibley South

25 November 2019

The wonderful Sibley Regional Volcanic Preserve has a southern extension, still being developed, that opened to the public recently. It’s at the head of San Leandro Creek upstream from the village of Canyon on the west side of Gudde Ridge, a part of the hills that’s always intrigued me. The land is in the foreground of this photo of Mount Diablo I took from Huckleberry Botanical Preserve in April 2009.

The property was homesteaded in the 1860s by Patrick and Catherine McCosker and remained in the family for the rest of that century and all of the next. It was a cattle ranch for most of that time, with a small kitchen orchard. The Oakland, Antioch & Eastern railroad exited the old Redwood Peak Tunnel eastbound near the ranch entrance and stopped there at a station named Eastport, still a locality on the map.

About the time when plans were floated to punch a new state highway up Shepherd Canyon and through the hills to the Lamorinda area, the McCoskers started a rock quarry in hopes of profit during the highway construction. (Transport distance is a very important factor in the crushed-stone business.) It operated from 1958 to 1971, then continued as a rock crushing plant serving various construction projects in the area.

After that business petered out and the land languished for a while, the McCosker descendants sold a 250-acre chunk known as the Texas parcel to the developers of Orinda’s Wilder Ranch community, and as part of a deal the land was donated to the East Bay Regional Parks District. The “McCosker Sub-Area” opened to the public in December 2016.

The parcel occupies most of the valley north of Eastport, as seen here on the 1959 topo map. I’ll show the bedrock map of the same area later.

It’s precious property for native plants and a good wildlife corridor, tucked between the Huckleberry preserve and steep, remote grazing land in the Sibley preserve. The District classifies it as a Natural Unit, managed for its “unique or fragile habitat values with public access primarily limited to trails.” Its permanent stream, a major tributary of upper San Leandro Creek given the name Alder Creek, will have some 1300 feet of decaying culvert removed and be restored to good riparian habitat suitable for native rainbow trout.

To protect this wild country, access for dogs and horses will be tightly controlled. (At present, dogs are not allowed at all.) Plans include a small campground suitable for backpackers on the major Bay trails.

On a misty weekday afternoon, it feels very far from the rest of the Bay area.

On sunny days, though, the views are good. I went back yesterday to capture some.

The rocks here are mainly from three map units: the Claremont Shale (the gold strip along the valley floor), the Orinda Formation (Tor, conglomerate) and Moraga Formation (Tmb, lava flows, and Tms, associated sediments).

The Claremont peeks out of the woods near the entrance with its characteristic, steeply dipping stripes.

The Orinda pokes out of the hillside with its characteristic beds of coarse gravel and cobbles — but only in roadcuts.

Elsewhere, out on the bare hillsides, the ground is nearly pure clay soil with only rare pebbles exposed, tokens of a very different terrain dating from some 10 million years ago.

The Moraga Formation lava is harder stuff, and there are a few actual outcrops in the high hills.

Near the entrance is a flat platform with a large shed, evidently built from quarry waste. It will become a parking lot and recreation area named Fiddleneck Field. For now it’s a parking lot for boulders from other parts of Sibley. Check them out. They represent the Orinda and Moraga formations, plus a few white limestone chunks from the Moraga sediment unit or the slightly younger Siesta Formation.

Some of the lava features the distinctive amygdales, former voids filled with hydrothermal minerals, found at Sibley.

Another thing to notice here and there is small landslides, like this slump at the edge of the Fiddleneck Field platform. Others occur along the ranch roads, which were built long ago by ranchers without the advice of geotechnical consultants.

As far as I can tell, the quarrying took place in scattered pits of no great size. That area is screened by oak/bay forest and cordoned off with barbed-wire fence, so it’s hard to tell. I look forward to seeing this land opened up as the District does more work.

In the meantime, there are splendid views to be had.

Give it a visit some time.

Details of the plans for this area are in the Sibley Land Use Plan, available if you search for it from the East Bay Regional Parks District website.

Posted in Oakland geology walks, Quarries and mines | 2 Comments »

Anomalies of Sausal Creek: Dimond Canyon

14 October 2019

This is the second of four posts about the peculiarities of Sausal Creek, going from its headwaters to the Bay. Here I’ll address Dimond Canyon, the 2-kilometer segment between the Warren Freeway and the flats of Dimond Park. The steep walls of the canyon, which is several hundred feet deep, are entirely hard sandstone of the Franciscan Complex, part of the Piedmont block.

This is the same stone quarried for decades in Rockridge (the Bilger quarry) and the land that would later become Piedmont (the Blair quarries and the Davie Stadium quarry). In fact the Diamond Cañon Quarry was one of two here in the canyon. It’s now occupied by the Zion Lutheran Church, as seen here from across the canyon.

The quarry scar appears on this terrain map as a big round nick in the canyon wall next to Park Boulevard.

A while ago in this space I described Dimond Canyon as a classic water gap — a stream-cut gorge crossing a bedrock ridge that otherwise seems impenetrable.

Geology textbooks will tell you there are two ways for streams to make a water gap. In the first way, the stream was there first (an antecedent stream) and a ridge of resistant rocks rose up around it. In dynamic California, this is a straightforward explanation of our water gaps. In the second, the ridge was there first, inherent in ancient deformed rocks buried under younger strata, and the stream (a superposed stream) cut down to, then into it while stripping off the overlying material. That’s how they explain the Delaware Water Gap and other examples in the gentle Appalachians.

Dimond Canyon is actually a semi-classic water gap. Yes, the ridge it crosses must have risen while the stream was cutting down, but the story is complicated by the fact that the watershed upstream lies across the Hayward fault, and is constantly being moved to the right. This means the canyon has hosted streams from several different watersheds over the past million years or so.

Therefore the streams feeding Sausal Creek today could not have dug the canyon; some predecessor watershed did it. There must have been gaps and surges in the water (and sediments) flowing through this canyon. If we ran things backward a million years, what would it show? The exercise would be blurred by serious uncertainties, but the matter is not beyond all conjecture.

I beg your indulgence as I present some slides from my talk to the Friends of Sausal Creek last month. They’re Google Earth views looking west across the fault. Here’s today, with the fault trace shown in red.

The view may be a bit confusing as I rewind the motion on the fault at about 10 millimeters per year. The far side looks the same because we’re focusing on it while it moves leftward, toward San Leandro. For a long time, Sausal Creek has been carried past small watersheds that, like today’s, could not possibly have carved Dimond Canyon. But about a million years ago, Dimond Canyon would have lined up with the watershed of Arroyo Viejo.

This looks promising because the watershed (the part above the fault) is about twice the size of Sausal Creek’s, giving it roughly twice as much water and cutting power to match.

But to make the canyon, you have to have something pushing up the ridge while the stream across it keeps cutting its way down. There’s nothing obvious that would have been pushing up the bedrock ridge at this time.

Going back a bit further, though, we line up with the great big watershed of San Leandro Creek, a dozen times larger. This stream has plenty of cutting power, evident in the canyon it’s dug where the dam and reservoir sit.

And finally, we have a mechanism here for uplifting the ridge that Dimond Canyon cuts across. The hills of San Leandro consist of a large slab of gabbro so big and strong that it deflects the Hayward fault slightly. Back when the sandstone of Dimond Canyon was grinding past the gabbro of San Leandro, the jostling between these two bodies of rock, caught in a vice by the geometry of the fault (a restraining bend), would have pushed both sides upward because that’s the only way out of the vice. And all the while San Leandro Creek would have been cutting a nice deep water gap as that hard rock rose.

Eventually, inevitably, the fault carried the water gap out of reach, and ever since then Dimond Canyon has housed lesser creeks for episodes of a few hundred thousand years. Sausal Creek trickles down the canyon today not doing much to it, the shrunken tenant of a structure built by a mightier maker.

This story (and that’s all it is really) appeals to me because it would also explain the presence of the Fan — the swath of gold on the geologic map representing Pleistocene sediment.

I’ve always regarded it as a fossil alluvial fan because of its shape on the map, but maybe that’s accidental. Maybe it’s just a chunk of old East Bay land that was lifted along with the Piedmont block, or washed off of it afterward.

I first posted about the problem of Dimond Canyon more than 10 years ago. Takes a while to figure out some things.

Posted in Hayward fault, Oakland geology puzzles, Oakland streams and water, Quarries and mines, Sausal Creek watershed, the Fan | Leave a Comment »

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