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Old growth California Oak
Hundreds of California Oaks over 100 years old and 15 inches in diameter
wait for the chain saws.
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Marked for Destruction: a tree already slated for removal.
The Montanera project calls for the destruction of 1,339 ordinance-sized
trees (defined by local regulation as trees with a trunk diameter of six inches at any point more than 4.5 feet above the ground). Most of these are old growth native coast
live oak, California bay, and willow.
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View from Tilden Park, south east into Gateway Valley
Looking eastward from Lomas Cantadas Road near the edge of Tilden Park.
The continuous open
space is an illusion - in reality, the freeway emerging from the
Caldecott Tunnel and slicing through the bottom of Siesta Valley presents
an impassable barrier for all those who walk or crawl, humans and other
species. Only a narrow, steep band of land along the crest of the
Berkeley hills serves as an actual corridor. Gateway Valley offers a buffer near that narrowest part of the corridor, where creatures must pass above the tunnel.
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The red star indicates the location of Gateway
Valley in relation to the wildlife corridor
Gateway Valley is a critical link in the
Greenbelt that makes the Bay Area such a habitable urban area. It
is particularly valuable as a wildlife corridor between Tilden and
Briones Parks in the north and the San Leandro Watershed and Las Trampas
Wilderness in the south. This corridor allows the mingling and
breeding that keeps local species alive and healthy throughout the
Greenbelt.
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View northwest from Gateway Valley, back towards Tilden Park
This is approximately the reverse view to the image above. Highway 24 is
between the camera and the far ridge under the clouds but the freeway lies unseen in a road cut.
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View Up Brookside Creek stream course
The major stream in Gateway Valley
is Brookside Creek, a headwater of San
Pablo Creek, which flows down through Orinda to the San Pablo Dam. This
low gap separates Gateway Valley from Moraga Valley and the headwater
of Moraga Creek, which flows through Moraga to the San Leandro
Reservoir. The site straddles the divide between the two major
watersheds of the region. Ironically, it is across that
divide that the applicant proposes to spread a golf course - of all the
possible uses of the land, potentially one of the most threatening to
water quality.
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A view of the old overgrown quarry
To the right of this picture you can see evidence of slumps and landslides, a characteristic of this landscape. Why do the prospective developers want to build on land that is historically very unstable?
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The pole marks one of the proposed golf course's 18 holes. How much
grading and earth-moving will be necessary to turn this sloping hillside into a
flat golf green? For obvious reasons, golf is a game for fairly
flat terrain: it was invented on grazed-over turf on sandy soil along the
rainy coasts of the British Isles. Does it make sense to attempt to force
this very different landscape into such a mold? Considering that
the average golf course consumes as much water as a city of 6,000
inhabitants, does it make sense to keep building so many of them in a
drought-prone region of
a state facing the prospect of severe water shortages?
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PICTURES AND MAPS,
page one |
page two |
page three |
page four (location and assorted maps)