Posts Tagged ‘mount tam’

Know Better Your Marin County: Nuclear-Capable Hill 88 Plus the West, Middle, and East Peaks of Mount Tamalpais

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

How many hills do you know of what come with their own Yelp entry?

You ought to get on up there sometime to check it out:

Hill 88 is a wild ghost town in the sky, hidden way up high in the Marin Headlands. It’s on Wolf Ridge, between Fort Cronkhite/Rodeo Beach and Tennessee Valley. You can barely see it from below, and it’s nothing like most of the old little rusty lifeless bunker sites. This is a crazy Cold War mega-complex teeming with tons of crows dancing in the whipping wind above huge expanses of the bay and SF. It’s part of the old Nike Missile program, officially SF-88C. Was apparently the radar and control center (aka the IFC, or Integrated Fire Control area) of the Nike Missile launch site that’s further down the hill to the east.”

So, those are some of the remnants of Project Nike on top of now-flattened Hill 88 in the foreground along with the three peaks of Mount Tam (with the West Peak also flattened by the Air Force) in the background.

As seen from San Francisco:

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Now, you Know Better Your Marin County.

Is That What You All Call Snow, Bay Area? Nothing Beats the Winter of Ought-Two for Snow

Monday, December 7th, 2009

If it’s colder than normal this AM and there’s some white stuff on the ground, well then I guess you could say it snowed in the San Francisco Bay Area. But back before the global warming the climate change, back in 2002, we had SNOW, baby.

As here, in ought-two up in Marin County on Mount Tamalpais, when I was out prospecting for gold with my donkey and/or on my Trek 8000 mountain bike (born 1991, Waterloo Wisconsin, died 2006, Civic Center, San Francisco). This is what it looked like in the afternoon ’til the rain melted everything.

Click to expand, why not? Heading to the East Peak with the Richmond San Rafael Bridge below:

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Now that was snow, the most we’ve had since 1976.

So, nothing after 1976 has beaten 2002 for snow in the bay area. (I think.)

Stay warm!

Marin County’s Hill 88: A Wild Ghost Town in the Sky, and Former Home to Nuclear Bombs

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

This is the view from San Francisco over the Golden Gate – can you see the defunct buildings of Hill 88 in front of the East Peak of Mount Tamalpais? Those buildings were the eyes and ears of SF-88, southern Marin’s very own Nike Hercules missile complex.

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The actual nuclear warheads and missiles were stored at another facility down the hill – you can visit that place Wednesday through Saturday.

What’s shown in this photo above is the radar station part of the base, on the summit, where they had German shepherd guard dogs, machine guns, the whole magilla until the 1970′s. San Francisco also had a similar setup back in the day using the Presidio and Mount Sutro, but that was the smaller, non-nuclear Nike Ajax system and there’s really nothing left to visit anymore.

But in Marin, you can climb up to the hilltop facility of SF-88 whenever you want - you’ll get nice views and you’ll have a chance to see the graffiti.

Come visit Marin’s Wild Ghost Town in the Sky.