Customer Reviews

Geologic Trips: San Francisco & the Bay Area

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It's clear that Konigsmark knows a fair amount about Franciscan geology. However, there is a ridiculously high number of errors in the maps accompanying the text. Just a few examples:

The San Joaquin River is described as having flowed through the Santa Clara Valley in the late Pleistocene.

Columbus Avenue is wrongly labeled as "Market Street" in a series of four maps: all the more egregious considering that the real Market Street is also labeled, and correctly.

A fault trace of the Hayward Fault in downtown Hayward is labeled as "San Andreas fault".

And so on. ... the number of trips described could be much larger. The East Bay hills are nowhere mentioned, despite dramatic and accessible displays of everything from Tertiary volcanism to warped and folded marine cherts to fossilized alluvial fans. But what really kills this book for me is the sloppy editing. If Geo Press can't even be bothered to copy edit howlers like those described above, why should I trust the rest of the book?

Don't bother with this book. There are singularly few trips, to begin with, and they cover such a tiny portion of the potential material. Worse, he misses all the good stuff! For instance, in San Francisco proper, due to geology classes I've taken and scouting around on my own, I could think of a score of excellent sites, whereas he chose only a few sites and those are mediocre-to-poor. Don't waste your money.

The book helped me on a high school geology project and provided me with all necessary information on Angel Island. It has maps that show where on the island all rock types can be found, and the history behind them.