Mussel Rock Park

Welcome, and before we start, one rule for the whole drive: this narration plays on its own as you reach each stop, so the screen is for your passenger or the parking lot — never the driver. Some stops you park and get out, like this one; others I'll narrate as you roll past, and I'll say “drive-by” so you're not hunting for parking.

Now look west, out to the ocean. You are standing on one of the most consequential seams on Earth. The San Andreas Fault runs right along the base of these cliffs and then walks straight out to sea — it doesn't go through San Francisco at all; it comes ashore, and leaves again, here at Mussel Rock. On the morning of April 18th, 1906, the fault let go, and the best estimates put the epicenter of the great San Francisco earthquake in the water just offshore of where you're standing. The ground under your feet is the ground that broke the city.

And what did we do with it? We dumped our garbage on it. From the late 1950s until 1978 this was the city landfill, until the water board ordered it shut — so a million cubic yards of refuse are capped right here, on top of the fault, on top of one of the biggest active landslides on the whole California coast. It should be the last place anyone wants to be.

Instead, look up. On a good day the sky above these cliffs is full of paragliders. This is “the Dumps,” one of the finest launch sites in North America — people come from all over to run off a cliff and ride the sea wind up six hundred feet. That's the whole tour in one view: the land that broke San Francisco, that the city then buried its trash on, is now where people jump off the edge for the sheer joy of it. Head back to the car — we're driving east.