Glen Echo Creek has had more than one name in the past. A while ago I wrote about the lower part of Glen Echo Creek, the part that flows through residential territory. This is a closer look at the upper part, where the creek is born in a bedrock valley and flows through beautiful Mountain View Cemetery, which uses it to water the grounds.

Because this part of the creek is so different from the part below, I’ll use the older name for it, Cemetery Creek. This area:

Before the cemetery, the stream was called Hays Creek because the main road up the valley was blazed by Col. Jack Hays around 1860 to access his estate, Fernwood, in Hays Canyon, the upper valley of Temescal Creek. Hays didn’t live here but now he lies here, in the massive Hays vault in Mountain View Cemetery. (Hays’s road got its current name of Moraga Avenue when it connected with the old Thorn Road over the hills to Moraga.)

Today none of Cemetery Creek exists as running water any more. The nearest thing is the ornamental cascade into the little sunken garden just above the main mausoleum, shown at the top of this post. The tea color of the water is the sign of its untreated nature. The cemetery’s water system is controlled from an elegant pumphouse seated within the stream valley, just about where hard bedrock rises on both sides.

Behind it is a dam roughly 30 feet high and a series of four holding ponds. They’re best seen on the geologic map, so here’s the excerpt covering the Cemetery Creek valley.

^{Gold shades are sediment including Qpaf, ancient gravel exhumed by uplift of the Piedmont block. Blue shades are Kfn, Franciscan sandstone; KJfm, Franciscan melange with major blocks of greenstone (fg) and chert (fc); and Kfgm, the “blue rock” of the Bilger quarry. Solid black line in upper right corner is the Hayward fault.}

I visited the ponds the other day, going upstream — the first:

the second:

and the third:

The ponds are not natural lakes, though they resemble them. Their nutrient-rich water supports algae and duckweed, the shallow edges host cattails and reeds, and the cemetery keeps an unkempt fringe of trees and shrubs around them. Ducks come by and find weeds to eat, but herons and egrets find little other than frogs and insects because the ponds aren’t there to support aquatic life. The cemetery draws down the two larger ponds every summer. Here’s how last year went, for example.

^{Google Earth images}

The three ponds are connected by concrete passages. This one, at the bottom of the first pond, has an overflow bypass to let stormwater through.

USGS topo maps from 1897, 1915, 1947 and 1959 show how the ponds have evolved over the years.

The fourth, uppermost pond is a tiny fenced-off thing that hardly counts:

The land there is in Piedmont. It used to be part of a larger parcel (best seen on the 1915 map) where its owner, Piedmont’s founder Walter Blair, operated a popular nature park in the 1890s. Trails in the creek’s upper canyon led through flourishing vegetation to pavilions and overlooks with splendid Bay views. Blair Park took full advantage of the creek’s water in fountains and cascades and pools. By the time of the 1915 map the park was long gone and the Realty Syndicate had opened and abandoned rock quarries there. Shortly afterward most of the land was sold off for residences while the city kept the rest. Today’s Blair Park, no relation to the old one, occupies landfill just uphill along Moraga Avenue.

Above the cemetery, Cemetery Creek and the rivulets that feed it are hidden in culverts. But there are — or were — bodies of water even up there, two more reservoirs named Dingee and Piedmont No. 2. They were “open-cut” reservoirs, dammed basins in the hillside lined with concrete and open to the air. Built by William J. Dingee’s Oakland Water Company in 1894 and 1905, respectively, they took water tapped from springs in the hills and fed it into pipes that served homes in Piedmont and west Montclair. East Bay MUD put concrete-and-timber caps on them in the 1930s, but now they’re both empty. The Dingee Reservoir site was declared surplus 20 years ago and now is for sale, asking $2.5 million, in case you want to pour a lot of money into a hole in the ground.

Cemetery Creek has little life any more, but the cemetery nonetheless honors it with something not seen anywhere downstream: fountains.

The water, even supplemented as it is from EBMUD sources, has a bit of that wild tinge. It still catches the light.

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