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.
Oakland Geology 
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