Muir Beach Overlook

2015.09.24

After I left Battery Spencer, I drove to the Muir Beach Overlook. The road to the Muir Beach Overlook was very narrow and it meandered to the Pacific Ocean. Since my schedule was a little bit delayed, the thought of skipping it crossed my mind. However, to avoid regretting it later, I still made my way there and it was totally worth it! I stood on the edge of the bluff, seeing far to the direction of Taiwan, thinking about my family and friends there. Time does fly! It had been more than two years after I left the 48 contiguous United States!

Muir Beach

This in-and-out, scalloped coastline holds clues to both ancient and ongoing stories. It contains coastal bluffs, rocky coastline, sandy beaches, mountain ridges, valleys, and peninsulas extending out into the sea. Each part tells a geologic tale.

The Rocks

Sticking out of the water, near shore, jagged "sea stacks" of hard basalt have endured pounding waves for millennia, as the sea eroded the bluffs around them. On land, much of the landscape is melange, part of the defining geology in the Bay Area, the Franciscan complex formation. Melange is a crushed jumble of ancient sea floor deposits and lava erupting along cracks underwater. Massive boulders dotting the rolling landscape are its clues. Like nuts in cookies, these harder greywacke sandstone and greenstone basalts emerge from undistinguishable rubble of crushed rock and softer seabed materials to create the picturesque California coastal landscape.

The Moving Land

Both Point Reyes and Bolinas peninsula have been inching their way north from Monterey for 12 to 15 million years. Bolinas and Point Reyes sit on the Pacific Plate and Muir Beach Overlook sit on the North American Plate. On its slowly grinding path, the Pacific Plate scrapes its edge along the North American plate while it also pushes up from beneath, forming the coastal mountains.

The famous San Andreas Fault separates the two plates and lies just offshore from Muir Beach Overlook, coming onto land at Stinson Beach, about ten miles to the north. Driving along Highway 1 for forty miles north from here, you can follow this famous fault along Stinson Beach and Bolinas Lagoon, through the Olema Valley and along Tomales Bay.

Soldiers Guarding the Coast

Early in World War II, the United States was reeling form Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and moved to augment the defense of San Francisco Bay from enemy ships. Base end "fire control" stations proliferated along the coast in those fearful times. Built to house soldiers on the lookout for enemy ships, and equipped with a very powerful spotting scope, they could relay ship coordinates to a central communications and plotting center, so powerful guns in nearby batteries could take accurate aim at their targets.

There are four historic base end stations, nicknamed "gopher holes" by the soldiers. The soldiers main duty was to scan the ocean for enemy ships. Each base end station had two men on duty at all times. Most base end stations were a single room, furnished with bare necessities. Two narrow bunks and a stove made them livable, but duty in these "gopher holes" could be cold and miserable.

Wearing Parkas in Summer

On many days, this was a cold, damp, windy, foggy, isolated place to be stationed during World War II. During the summer of 1944, an officer commanding one of the stations at Muir Beach Overlook put in a supply request for cold weather parkas and fur lined boots for the men. A few days later, he received a call from a supply sergeant at an army depot. Why, the sergeant wanted to know, did the coast artillery need Arctic-type clothing...in California? He had just shipped an order of summer-weight shorts and shirts to the Army air force base at Hamilton Field. Weren't the two posts just a few miles apart? The lieutenant replied: "You'd have to be from the Bay Area to understand."