Two of my favorite haunts in Oakland are the parks in the hills and the estuary. What I wondered about, though, is what connects them. I’ve covered much of the city’s streets in cars, in buses and on foot, but traveling block by block doesn’t provide a sense of Oakland’s landscape. The city rests on giant folds in the earth on the side of a slope falling to the Pacific Ocean. In order to understand Oakland’s geography, I figured I would have to walk it.

I decided to start at the city’s highest point, and walk until I hit the estuary. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I found is a part of the city that evoked a sense of wilderness (fish in creek pools, screeching hawks, and the shade of giant forests), one of the best examples of riparian habitat in the East Bay, and a flood plain that became Fruitvale Avenue.

First, I had to find the highest point in Oakland. I thought a simple Google search would deliver the answer. Instead, the search turned up things like “highest peak murder rate in 1992”. After finding other inconclusive Internet information, I visited the topographic map collection at the Oakland Public Library. It turned out that Grizzly Peak, with an elevation of 1,754 feet, is just barely within the city limits and would work as my starting point.

To reach the goal of ending up at the estuary, I figured I could follow some of the natural drainages leading to the bay. I eventually decided on following the Palo Seco creek to the Sausal creek, which meets saltwater near the Fruitvale Fishing Pier. Most of this decision was based on the fact that these creeks are mostly still above the ground, while large parts of other East Bay creeks flow through culverts or engineered structures.

Making my way to the top of Grizzly Peak one Saturday morning, I found myself bushwhacking, and at points crawling on my stomach through dense growth.  From a little parking area, right off Grizzly Peak Road, the actual Grizzly Peak doesn’t look like much. If you’re not looking for it, the peak’s easy to miss.  But crawling through the brush to reach the summit – only several hundred yards from my car – gave the whole ordeal some authenticity. It was only later, when I approached the peak from the road, and not the park, that I saw it was an easy jaunt to the top.

So there I was, pinned to the ground by some bramble brush, when I heard the sound of the Tilden steam train. As the whistle blew, the clouds hid the sun. It was a strange start to the trip. I eventually untangled myself and headed down Grizzly Peak to begin the walk.

The first section required a bit of navigating through the roads and trails of Tilden Regional Park. Every few hundred feet there was a decision to make: to turn, to follow a trail, to go down a road. Eventually, though, I made it out. I passed the camping Boy Scouts and steam train goers, and found a trail that followed the ridge of the hills south, along the fringe of Oakland. I continued this way for several miles, and was enjoying the vistas of the Siesta Valley, and Mount Diablo to the east, and the occasional shot of the Bay and the city below to the west. The hills were quiet and peaceful. A hawk’s cry replaced the train whistle. It was a sound that would reoccur at regular intervals throughout the journey.

Somewhere over the Caldecott tunnel, there is a grove of oak trees that are old and weathered. They stand over the tunnel, and look out at the valley that Highway 24 snakes through. After the oak grove, but before Sibley Regional Park, the forest changes from predominately oaks and ferns on rolling hills, to a denser, darker forest of eucalyptus and Monterey pine.

Past the volcanic peaks of Sibley, the trail, still following the ridge, dips down into Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve. Here, the plants are all native. It’s an ecological island of what the local flora must have looked like before the aromatic eucalyptus and Monterey pine invaded.

Down in a little valley in Huckleberry, I lost my sense of place. Live oaks and Bay laurels shade giant ferns. The dale was quiet and inviting. I wanted to stay, but I pressed on.

By the afternoon I was well into Redwood Park. The hawk was still occasionally making its sounds from above. Somewhere around the Chabot Space and Science Center, I started making my way down the hill. I crossed Skyline and was in Joaquin Miller City Park. Somehow, I managed to travel in a circle for a while, even though I was convinced I was heading downhill the whole time. At times, I could see through the trees to the city and the estuary below.

I continued down, and eventually met up with the tiny trickle of the Palo Seco Creek. This part of Joaquin Miller Park is distinctive from anything that exists above it on the hill. Redwoods and hemlocks that are young, but tall, dominate the little creek valley.  As the trail continues down, the sides of the hills press tighter and grow steeper – like a funnel – pulling me into the creek bed and towards the bay.

Right before the Palo Seco crosses Highway 13 and meets up with Sausal Creek, ivy begins to dominate the landscape. Initially, the ivy growing between the redwoods and up steep ravine walls lend the landscape an almost tropical feel. But then it becomes evident that the ivy, perhaps run rampant from someone’s backyard, is choking the native under-story. Ivy is a problem here and Friends of the Sausal Creek, a group of folks concerned with the ivy imperialism, are having a volunteer work session to try to restore some native habitat on September 29.

The sound of people thwacking golf balls at the Montclair Driving Range told me I was near the place where the Dimond Canyon Trail meets up with Sausal Creek. The upper section of the canyon seems untouched. The creek flows even in late summer. But part way down, the Works Progress Administration projects of the 1930’s, which were intended to control the flow of the creek, start. It’s interesting, a bit of history, overgrown and retaken over by the flow of the creek. For a while, the trail is in the creek bed. You can hop from rock to rock, stopping long enough to grab handfuls of wild blackberries.  The trail eventually crosses El Centro Road, and heads down into Dimond Park. The creek in this area used to be dammed up and used as a swimming hole; now, however, the park is home to a public pool. Civilization.

It’s here that Sausal Creek goes underground in culverts and roughly follows the path of Fruitvale Avenue. I continued on down Fruitvale, where taco trucks replaced the blackberry bushes and landscaped hedges replaced the native vegetation. The walk is flat and paved, but the land around Fruitvale used to be home to willow groves, which gives Sausal creek – sausal meaning willow in Spanish -- its name.

In the mid-1800s, the area I had just walked through, Joaquin Miller Park, and Redwood Park were heavily logged to provide building material. Oakland’s first sawmill was on the Palo Seco creek, and the huge logs were pulled on skids down Fruitvale Avenue.

The sky took on the golden glow of the end of a day, and after walking many blocks, I reached the estuary. I located the confluence of Sausal creek, which now flows out of a culvert big enough to drive a car in, right next to the Fruitvale fishing pier under the bridge. Without knowing, you would need a divining rod to know that a creek runs under Fruitvale Avenue, but it is definitely there.