Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve is hosting a research project focused on the Alameda whipsnake (Masticophis lateralis euryxanthus), also sometimes referred to as the Alameda striped racer (Coluber lateralis euryxanthus). This elusive and speedy snake is protected at the state and federal level and may be found in the park.

One day last fall we received an email asking if any of us at the Conservancy knew about an art piece composed entirely on location high along the ridge of Claremont Canyon.

There are many ways to keep abreast of the goings-on in Claremont Canyon—and also in its surrounding neighborhoods. If you are interested mainly in the wildlands of Claremont Canyon and the activities of the Claremont Canyon Conservancy, including our hikes, stewardship projects, trail upkeep, and wildfire safety, we have a monthly one-page newsletter that we send out by email to our members and anyone else who signs up for the service.

In 1989, my family and I moved into our new home on a steep, narrow road that dead-ended in a marvelous wildland park. Our lot was the last on the street and was itself effectively a wild garden with a shady front yard of live oak trees and a sunny back hill covered with grass and forbs. 

INVITE YOUR BUDDIES TO GO BIRDING with you in Claremont Canyon and you may be met with excuses. Most serious birders don’t spend time in Claremont Canyon, believing the effort to find birds unlikely to pay off.

A half a dozen of us were fortunate to accompany Lech last Saturday on a botanical exploration of coastal scrub-grassland interface areas on the south facing slope. We first met mid-canyon along Claremont Avenue at the Telegraph Canyon Trail where we left off a couple of cars.

SOMETIMES IMPORTANT THINGS end up in unexpected places. In 1895 several 400-pound cast iron boundary markers were placed along the ridgetop boundary between Alameda County and Contra Costa County. One was positioned right at the top of Claremont Canyon, close to what we know as “Four Corners,” the intersection of Grizzly Peak Boulevard and Claremont Avenue/Fish Ranch Road. 

ALTHOUGH WE ARE NOW IN THE MIDST of a comprehensive project to collect an audio history of Claremont Canyon, the beginnings sprang from a casual curiosity about the early days in the canyon. Our board member, Tamia Marg, who spent her childhood there remembered “Tappy” Marron, whose family built the house that the Park District now occupies at the end of Gelston Road. 

For many years I have believed we need a substantial fuel-reduction zone– similar in scale to the Tilden Fuelbreak at the edge of North Berkeley–in the complex two miles of wildland-urban intermix in Claremont Canyon. This idea runs up against practical, aesthetic, jurisdictional, and inertial challenges that may be overcome if we can begin to think of such a buffer zone as a cultural landscape.

In August, the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association hosted a series of walks and talks concentrating on Strawberry Canyon as a cultural landscape. Walks—or rambles as they called them—occurred on Panoramic Hill, at the Botanical Garden, and along the Upper Jordan Trail, which connects to the Ridge Trail above Claremont and Strawberry Canyons.

The sulfur shelf is one of the most conspicuous mushrooms found in the East Bay Hills. Sulfur shelves begin to sprout from stumps and on older, weakened or burned trees, particularly eucalyptus, in early October before the fall rains have come.

How was it formed? The Claremont Chert is a marine sedimentary rock, originally deposited in a hemipelagic environment. This term refers to depositional basins which are neither near-shore nor in the deep sea. 

At first, I wondered if my husband had a secret admirer. I could hear a tapping at the window of his study, like someone wanting to get in. But when I went to investigate, no one was there. Then again— tap, tap, tap— and I saw him, a chubby, brown bird earnestly pecking and flapping at his own reflection.