Geology of the National Parks Through Pictures - Golden Gate NRA

My next post about the Geology of the National Parks Through Pictures is part of a series of parks that the wife and I hit while we were visiting the wineries in the Sonoma Valley.

You can find more Geology of the National Parks Through Pictures as well as my Geological State Symbols Across America series at my website Dinojim.com.

This post relates to the California Geological State Symbols post that came out earlier this week.

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Golden Gate National Recreation Area
Continuing our trip from the Muir Woods National Monument, we then travailed some of the Presidio's national parks, including taking pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge itself. We weren't able to visit a lot of the surrounding areas of the park but hopefully we will be able to visit them at a future date.

Arriving at the Golden Gate Bridge we went to take in the overlook of the bridge and got an eyeful of the famous San Francisco fog. The fog is produced when the hotter air located within the city itself and the surrounding areas come in contact with the cool air blowing in off the Pacific ocean. When these two air masses come in contact, the warmer air is forced upwards creating clouds, or in this instance, fog.

 Eventually the bridge did come out to visit us (at least most of it). From here you can barely see the Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate (the name of the body of water in which the bridge crosses). These rocks were instrumental in understanding the plate tectonics of California and the former subduction zone that was eventually transformed into the San Andreas Fault Complex. The Marin Headland rocks are mostly composed of jumbled up deep marine rocks including cherts and basalts.

 Across the way is also Alcatraz, which is another national park. So we will save the description of that one until I'm actually able to visit it.

Here is one of the various walking trail tunnels that can be found within the bridge area trails. I'm not really sure their purpose.

View of the bridge and the Marin Headlands from down below the bridge.