Zabriski Point, Death Valley by James Gordon

Death Valley is the lowest, driest and hottest valley in the United States. It is the location of the lowest elevation in North America at 85.5 m (282 ft) below sea level. It holds the record for the highest reliably reported temperature in the Western hemisphere (134 °F (56.7 °C) at Furnace Creek in 1913, as discussed below) - just short of the world’s highest, which was 136 F (58 C) in El Aziza, Libya on Sept. 13, 1922.

Located southeast of the Sierra Nevada range in the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert, it constitutes much of Death Valley National Park. It runs north-south between the Amargosa Range to the east and the Panamint Range to the west; the Sylvania Mountains and the Owlshead Mountains form its northern and southern boundaries, respectively. It has an area of about 3,000 square miles (~7,800 km²).

Geography

Geologically, Death Valley is considered one of the best examples of the Basin and Range configuration. It lies at the southern end of a geological trough known as the Walker Lane which runs north into Oregon. The valley is bisected by a right lateral strike slip fault system, represented by the Death Valley Fault and the Furnace Creek Fault. The eastern end of the left lateral Garlock Fault intersects the Death Valley Fault. Located on the border of California and Nevada, Death Valley is the principal feature of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve. Death valley also contains salt pans. According to current geological consensus, during the middle of the Pleistocene era there was a succession of inland seas (collectively referred to as Lake Manly) located over where Death Valley is today, but as the area turned to desert the water evaporated, leaving behind the abundance of evaporitic salts such as common sodium salt and borax, which were subsequently exploited in the early portion of the modern history of the region (1883 to 1907 - see http://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Geology/dv/Boron/home.html#History). After the most prolific rainy seasons, a temporary lake has been known to form at Badwater; when this occurs, non-motorized watercraft are allowed by the National Park Service. (However, motorized watercraft are not allowed as it is a designated wilderness area.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Mono Lake by StuSeeger

Mono Lake is an alkaline and hypersaline lake in California, United States that is a critical nesting habitat for several bird species and is an unusually productive ecosystem.

Geology

Mono Lake is believed to have formed at least 760,000 years ago, dating back to the Long Valley eruption. Sediments located below the ash layer hint that Mono Lake could be a remnant of a larger and older lake that once covered a large part of Nevada and Utah, making it among the oldest lakes in North America.

Mono Lake is a terminal lake in a watershed fed from melting runoff with no outlet. Dissolved salts in the runoff thus remain in the lake and raise the pH and the salt concentration.

Mono Lake is in a geologically active area at the north end of the Mono-Inyo Crater volcanic chain of the Long Valley Caldera. The geological activity is caused by faulting at the base of the Sierra Nevada, and is associated with the crustal stretching of the Basin and Range Province.

Read the rest of this entry »

Glacier Point is a viewpoint above Yosemite Valley, in California, USA. It is located on the south wall of Yosemite Valley at an elevation of 7,214 feet (2,199 m), 3,200 feet (980 m) above Curry Village. The point offers a superb view of Yosemite National Park, including Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, Vernal Fall, Nevada Fall, and Clouds Rest.

Yosemite National Park - Glacier Point

Glacier Point can be reached from the Valley via Glacier Point Road. Allow approximately 1 hour to reach Glacier Point by car. During the summer, Glacier Point is often mobbed with tourists. Tours by bus are also available and take about four hours. The road is usually open from June through October. In winter, Glacier Point Road closes due to snow, and access to Glacier Point from the Badger Pass Ski Area is only by ski or snowshoe.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yosemite National Park (pronounced “yo-SEM-it-ee”, IPA: /joʊˈsɛmɨtiː/) is a national park located in the eastern portions of Tuolumne, Mariposa and Madera counties in east central California, United States. The park covers an area of 761,266 acres or 1,189 square miles (3,081 km²) and reaches across the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain chain. Yosemite is visited by over 3.5 million people each year, many of whom only spend time in the seven square miles (18 km²) of Yosemite Valley.

Designated a World Heritage Site in 1984, Yosemite is internationally recognized for its spectacular granite cliffs, waterfalls, clear streams, Giant Sequoia groves, and biological diversity. Almost 95% of the park is designated wilderness. Although not the first designated national park, Yosemite was a focal point in the development of the national park idea, largely owing to the work of people like John Muir.

Yosemite is one of the largest and least fragmented habitat blocks in the Sierra Nevada, and the park supports a diversity of plants and animals. The park has an elevation range from 2,000 to 13,114 feet (600 to 4,000 m) and contains five major vegetation zones: chaparral/oak woodland, lower montane, upper montane, subalpine, and alpine. Of California’s 7,000 plant species, about 50% occur in the Sierra Nevada and more than 20% within Yosemite. There is suitable habitat or documentation for more than 160 rare plants in the park, with rare local geologic formations and unique soils characterizing the restricted ranges many of these plants occupy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fishermans Wharf by david.nikonvscanon

Fishermans Wharf is San Francisco’s most popular destination among travelers, with circa 12 million visitors flocking here each year. For over a century its historic waterfront was the hub of the city’s fishing fleet and is still famous for the for the depth and variety of its harvest, as well as for having some of the best seafood restaurants in the city. Today, it’s also renowned for its numerous tourist attractions such as museums, souvenir stores, historical buildings and piers, and scenic vistas over the Bay. It is located at the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, along the San Francisco Bay. It runs all the way from Pier 39, through to Municipal Pier at the end of Aquatic Park. It is bordered by Van Ness Ave to the east and Bay St to the south.

Understand

Three generations of fishermen have worked on the Wharf since the 19th century and the days of the Gold Rush. Once boasting an impressive flotilla of nearly 500 fishing vessels, the fleet’s numbers have dwindled over time. Today, the boats moored at the Wharf are only equipped to supply San Francisco’s restaurants with a small portion of their seafood appetites. Most of the remaining vessels are moored at Fish Alley, close to Pier 47.

Every year the Wharf attracts millions of visitors to its numerous and eclectic attractions including; the sea lions at Pier 39, the Maritime Museum, the chocolate factory at Ghirardelli Square, Hyde St Pier, and of course the infamous Alcatraz. There are also some great vistas overlooking the Bay, and a plethora of restaurants to enjoy them from. Additionally, many people visit the Wharf to either take a ferry or a cruise around the Bay. The Wharf is also home to many events such as the Fourth of July celebrations, Crab Season, and Fleet Week. Being a tourist haven, expect to see large crowds, an abundance of t-shirt stores, novelty museums, and street performers all vying for your attention. Many locals are put off by the crowds on the Wharf, and the seemingly “tacky” nature of many of the tourist stores and attractions. However, all things considered, there is probably enough here to keep everyone happy.

Get around

Fisherman’s Wharf is best seen on foot, but there are also pedicabs, horse-drawn carriages, and of course the F-Line streetcar, all of which will take you up and down the Wharf. There are also several companies in the district that rent bikes out to tourists by the hour or for the day, including Bay City Bike, Bike and Roll, and Blazing Saddles Bike Rentals. The California Welcome Center is located on the second level of PIER 39, and they offer visitor maps and information on Fisherman’s Wharf which will help you navigate your way around.

See

The Wharf is a very compact area and attractions are centered mainly along the half-mile stretch of Jefferson St. So, ambling along Jefferson from from east to west you’ll discover:

Read the rest of this entry »

San Francisco - Chinatown by fotologic

With pagoda-tiled roofs, Cantonese conversations, busy live-produce markets, mahjong players, and little old Chinese ladies confidently spitting on the pavement — Chinatown is a unique part of San Francisco. Established in 1850, in the area around Portsmouth Plaza, San Francisco’s Chinatown is reputed to be the oldest and one of the largest and most famous of all Chinatowns outside of Asia.

Many of the Chinese who settled here were merchants or immigrant workers, working on either the transcontinental railroad or as mine workers during the Gold Rush. Today, it is home for more than 15,000 Chinese and Chinese-Americans, many of whom are low-income, elderly, and foreign born, living in dense tenements. It is also a cultural link for the hundreds of thousand Chinese and Chinese-Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chinatown holds a prominent position in the history of Chinese and Chinese-Americans in the United States, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the present day. The residual “bachelor” society one finds in San Francisco’s Chinatown today cannot be understood without some knowledge of these hostile decades.

The tourist section of Chinatown is mainly along Grant Avenue, from Bush to Broadway. Grant Avenue was made famous by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. The Chinatown market area is mainly along Stockton Street, one block above (west of) Grant Avenue, and the east-west streets crossing Stockton. Other San Francisco concentrations of Chinese shops and restaurants are located in the Inner Richmond District, mainly along Clement, and the Outer Sunset District, mainly along Irving.

Chinatown is a unique immigrant neighborhood, and consequently there are almost no large chain-stores to be found. In Chinatown, Grant Avenue is the main shopping thoroughfare for tourists. Here you will find Oriental handicrafts of all descriptions, from jade statues, to Asian rugs and kimonos. It also has many souvenir stores and small market stalls that sell typical tourist knickknacks. Stockton street runs parallel to Grant on its west, and has many fresh produce and household ware stores that are popular with locals. Here is a selection of the stores available:

Read the rest of this entry »

Haight Ashbury by Alaskan Dude

The Haight is a district of San Francisco, running along Haight Street. The district is bounded roughly by the Panhandle and Fell/Oak Streets on the north, Market Street on the east, Duboce Avenue and Buena Vista Park on the south, and Stanyan Street (and Golden Gate Park) on the west, with a small extension west to include the University of California, San Francisco Parnassus campus just to the west.

Understand

The Haight is made up of two neighborhoods: Haight-Fillmore, usually called the Lower Haight, and Haight-Ashbury, also known as the Upper Haight. The two neighborhoods are separated by a large hill and are bisected by Divisadero Street. The neighborhoods have two separate histories whose cultures and identities merged in the 1960’s as poor, young white hippies moved into the Upper Haight and began to communicate and learn from poor, young black residents of the Lower Haight. Together, these “outcasts” forged the counter-culture movement the Haight is most well known for.

Today, they remain similar, yet distinct. The Upper Haight is more of a tourist destination, more identified with its hippy roots, and is safer, especially since the 1990’s. The Lower Haight retains more of its black roots, has a more active night-life, but is unfortunately poorer, and therefore dirtier and less safe at night.

The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood loosely spans north-south from the Panhandle to 17th Street and east-west from Divisadero Street to Stanyan Street. A portion of the Fillmore District bounded by lower Haight Street evolved into the “Lower Haight” largely due to gentrification. Slightly more upscale areas of the rapidly gentrifying Haight-Ashbury essentially seceded, forming the “Upper Haight” and “Cole Valley” districts.

In the 60’s large portions of the predominantly African American Fillmore District, once thriving with a large percentage of Black home- and business-ownership, including but not limited to several famous jazz clubs, were involuntarily relocated to the Haight-Ashbury due to “urban renewal.” Urban renewal was distrusted by many as merely a means to move, usually lower-income, people around at the whim of developers. A popular protest slogan in the 1960’s was “Urban Renewal Means Negro Removal.” The Haight’s abundant Victorian homes had undergone rampant subdivision in order to accommodate the influx of WWII soldiers. Subsequently, suburbia began to sprawl and attract urban middle class whites able to afford automobiles and real estate. This phenomenon is referred to as “white flight.” San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, with its then-surplus of affordable Victorian homes, was among the many metropolitan areas ripe for housing the influx of often large families from the rural south. They sought urban factory and other employment as agri-business displaced them from their small family farms.

The Haight-Ashbury relatively quietly integrated and took on a “live and let live” laidback ambiance. The Beats, similarly displaced from their warehouse digs due to Financial District sprawl, also gravitated toward the Haight. They were attracted not only to the abundance of affordable housing, but also to the budding diversity consisting of S.F. State’s intellectual and increasingly anti-establishment student population (enjoying cheap group housing), an emerging (pre-Castro District) gay and lesbian community, and the African American working class families righteously distrustful of a system that had taken away their farms, their homes and now their sons to the Vietnam War. White middle class college kids derailed by the draft now identified and allied with other oppressed peoples of the world, adopted ideologies and lifestyles of gentler, kinder and more sustainable cultures. Mostly teens, but people of all ages, ethnicities, religions and economic backgrounds, tuned in, turned on and dropped out of mainstream society at rates not seen before or since. They followed their hearts toward, what seemed to subscribers of the establishment to be impossibly utopian, alternative lifestyles. Many thrived, many were victims of COINTELPRO, other lives were ruined by destructive drugs such as speed, heroin and cocaine, and some remain committed today to ushering in a more inclusive, environmentally harmonious, more egalitarian, less stressful and more fun way of life — basically these were the hippie values.

Read the rest of this entry »

Golden Gate Bridge

US 101 (from Park-Presidio or Lombard St entrance), +1 415 921-5858 (email:bridgecomments@goldengate.org) . Open 24 hours, occasionally closed Sunday morning for events. $5 (toll driving south into San Francisco; free on foot or bike).

The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the opening of the San Francisco Bay onto the Pacific Ocean. As part of both U.S. Route 101 and State Route 1, it connects the city of San Francisco on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula to Marin County.

The Golden Gate Bridge had the longest suspension bridge span in the world when it was completed in 1937 and has become an internationally recognized symbol of San Francisco and California. Since its completion, the span length has been surpassed by eight other bridges. It still has the second longest suspension bridge main span in the United States, after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. In 2007, it was ranked fifth on the List of America’s Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects.

Setting

The Golden Gate Bridge spans the Golden Gate, a narrow, 400-foot (120 m) deep strait that serves as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, between San Francisco at the northernmost tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, and the Marin Headlands at the far southern end of Marin County. Although close by proximity, the two sides of the strait are separated by significant natural obstacles. Crossing the strait directly by boat is dangerous because of strong currents and lack of suitable landings. Ocean tides drive an average of 528 billion gallons (2 billion cubic meters) of water every six hours, at peak currents exceeding 5.6 miles per hour (2.5 m/s). Circumnavigating the Bay, however, involves a trip of several hundred miles and crossing several major rivers.

Read the rest of this entry »

See also San Francisco

Golden Gate Bridge by Paraflyer

The City and County of San Francisco is the fourth most populous city in California and the 14th most populous city in the United States, with a 2007 estimated population of 764,976. Among the most densely populated cities in the country, San Francisco is part of the San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan area, which is home to more than 7.2 million people. The city is located at the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean to the west, San Francisco Bay to the east, and the Golden Gate to the north.

In 1776, the Spanish settled the tip of the peninsula, establishing a fort at the Golden Gate and a mission named for Francis of Assisi. The California Gold Rush in 1848 propelled the city into a period of rapid growth, transforming into the largest city on the West Coast at the time. After being devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. During World War II, San Francisco was the send-off point for many soldiers to the Pacific Theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, massive immigration, liberalizing attitudes, and other factors gave rise to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a liberal bastion in the United States.

San Francisco is a popular international tourist destination famous for its landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, the cable cars, Coit Tower, and Chinatown, its steep rolling hills, and its eclectic mix of Victorian and modern architecture. The city is also known for its diverse, cosmopolitan population, including large and long-established Asian American and LGBT communities.

Read the rest of this entry »