Muir Beach Overlook

The first long view of the open coast north of the Golden Gate comes half a mile past Muir Beach, where a narrow spine of rock runs out from the highway and falls away on three sides to the surf. On a clear day San Francisco shows to the south; to the north the cliffs of Mount Tamalpais State Park run on toward Stinson.

The concrete holes set into the slope are older than the overlook. After Pearl Harbor the Army ringed San Francisco Bay with base-end stations — small fire-control posts where soldiers watched for ships through powerful spotting scopes. Two posts sighting the same target from either end of a known baseline gave a plotting room enough to triangulate its range, speed and heading, and the plotting room turned that into firing data for the gun batteries in the Marin Headlands. Each station kept two men on duty at all times. The soldiers called them gopher holes, and four survive here. Radar made the whole system obsolete.

The posts were cold, damp and lonely work. The Park Service's own panel tells of a supply sergeant baffled that coast artillery in California was ordering Arctic clothing.