Golden Moments

We've returned from a week of business meetings in San Francisco. In the weekend we took some time out to explore the Marin Headlands. The weather played its part with blue skies and sunshine. We even had an impromptu show by the local Coast Guard putting out to sea.  Here's a few visual highlights.

Finally here's a panorama I've stitched together using my favourite software application.  This tool is amazing.

Avenue of the Giants

The Coast Redwoods of northern California are world’s tallest trees. The current record holder, Hyperion, towers more than 115 metres and one of dozens that exceed 100 metres in height.  Coast Redwoods grow in a narrow strip of land on the Pacific west coast covering an area approximately 750km in length that stretches inland between 8 and 75kms.

The largest and tallest surviving population of trees can be found in Humboldt County in Northern California.  Most are now protected within the Humboldt Redwoods State Park.  Within the park a former Route 101 highway provides visitors with ready access to many of its tallest trees.  A four-lane freeway by-pass, opened in 1960, saw this wonderfully scenic route aptly renamed the Avenue of the Giants.  Its 51km length takes motorist through one towering groves of trees after another.  In places the road narrows and weaves to accommodate the trunks of mature trees along its verge.

Garry and I spent a weekend exploring the area earlier this month while on a business trip to San Francisco.  We based ourselves at the Benbow Historic Inn situated on a picturesque bend of the South Fork Eel River. We stayed in one of the Inn’s original rooms that included an expansive private balcony overlooking the hotel’s landscaped grounds, an old stone arch bridge and the river’s crystal clear waters.

The Redwood groves are truly magical.  Nothing can prepare you for the majesty of these unique trees or the wonderfully serene and relatively open forest that surrounds them.  Highlights of our visit included the Founder’s Grove where the 112 metre long Dyerville Giant rests after falling in 1991. Nearby the Founder’s Tree still stands at almost 100 metres.  We also did the inevitable tourist thing and drove our car through the impressive Shrine Drive-Thru Tree near Myers Flats.

However, the most impressive grove we visited would have to have been the Tall Trees Grove on Mattole Road, a side road that winds for miles through the State Park’s densest concentration of mature trees.  The Tall Tree Grove was filled with dozens of mature fallen trees that were simply breath-taking in size and scope.  The grove is also home to the Giant Tree whose girth exceeds a staggering 16 metres in circumference. (Oh yes – it’s also the world’s 18^th tallest tree.

The last line of defence

Last Saturday Garry and I visited the Nike Missile Defence Museum. I’d stumbled across this unique site by chance during a Google search a few months earlier. I was surprised to learn that until 1974 the San Francisco region has been surrounded by a defensive ring of nuclear missile batteries.

The museum, located on the Marin Headlands, tells the story of hundreds of similar sites that once protected cities throughout the USA from the threat of nuclear-armed Soviet bombers. In recent years, declassified records have revealed that the Soviets had made plans to explode at least one 40 megatons nuclear weapon in front of Alcatraz; just below the surface of San Francisco Bay.

The resulting fallout of contaminated water and debris was designed to render the entire region uninhabitable for more than a century. The strategic value of such an act is clear when you learn that the Bay Area is the only significant sheltered harbour on the US west coast for more than 1000 kilometres.

The Nike-Ajax, and its successor the nuclear-capable Nike-Hercules, were medium range antiaircraft missiles. Guided by a complex system of radars and tracking computers, they had ranges of up to 37 miles (Ajax) and 87 miles (Hercules) and could shoot down planes travelling at two to three times the speed of sound. Nike-Hercules could achieve supersonic speeds within a couple of seconds of launch and reach its target in less than a minute.

We learnt that the Nike system was not only the most expensive missile system ever deployed, it was also the most widespread (300 sites in 30 states) and longest-lived (25 years nationwide). Around the Bay Area alone 12 permanent launch sites and their associated control, housing, and command sites were constructed.

However, after an investment of US$1.16 billion this defensive network was ultimately decommissioned as Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) ICBM missiles superseded the role of long-range bombers. ICBMs could fly at altitudes and speeds beyond which defensive missiles could reach, effectively leaving them without targets to hit. The Nike missile system was declared obsolete by 1974 and the last missiles were taken out of service in 1979.

The Nike Missile Defence Museum was created to preserve a lasting record of this period. It’s the last surviving site of its kind. We were lucky enough to visit on a day when former army veterans were conducting on-site tours. It was fascinating to hear their stories about maintaining the missiles, preparing them for launch and living with the ever-present threat of nuclear Armageddon.  It was also rather terrifying to learn that a 19-year-old Army recruit was ultimately responsible for pushing the button.

Our veteran guides explained that, in the San Francisco area, the Nike antiaircraft defences oeprated at a continual high state of readiness from 1954 and through to the implementation of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in 1974. This state of readiness meant that one or more Nike batteries in the Bay Area were always ready to launch missiles with three minutes of positively identify an incoming Soviet bomber more than 150 miles away.

Our tour of the site took us into a range of facilities that included the ordinance shed where nuclear weapons were installed in each missile, into one of two underground bunkers where six missiles were stored and into the mobile radar tracking and missile firing control centre. However, the highlight of the tour was watching a missile being raised from the underground bunker on a hydraulic lift and then erected into a vertical position for launch. Despite its age, the technology remains impressive!