Full transcript
The Edge
Lands End is where San Francisco runs out. The trail starts at the Sutro Baths ruins and hugs the cliff for a mile and a half to Eagles Point. Below you is the mouth of the Golden Gate, the narrow slot where the bay meets the Pacific and where the current runs fast enough to spin a ship sideways. On a clear day you can see the Farallon Islands twenty seven miles out. On a foggy one you hear the foghorn on the bridge before you see anything. Both versions are the real San Francisco.
The Shipwrecks You Walk Past
Three ships went down within sight of this trail. The Ohioan grounded in 1936 and sat on the rocks for months while people posed for photographs. The Lyman Stewart, an oil tanker, split in half in 1922 — you can see its engine block at low tide from Mile Rock Beach. The Frank Buck, a freighter carrying crude oil, hit the rocks in 1937, and pieces of its hull are still visible from the overlook. These are not maritime disasters in the Titanic sense. No one died on any of them. They are stories of fog and bad judgment and the practical difficulty of steering a five hundred foot vessel through a quarter mile gap with a six knot current.
What to Do
Walk the full trail to Eagles Point and back. Stop at Mile Rock Beach — a steep wooden staircase leads down to a pocket of sand most visitors miss. Out at Eagle's Point there used to be a stone labyrinth. An artist named Eduardo Aguilera laid it out in secret in 2004, vandals wrecked it, and he rebuilt it — over and over, once with fifty volunteers a month after it was flattened in 2015. It has not been there since 2021. Somebody has since dragged the stones back up and made a heart out of them, which is either the end of the story or the next round of it. Go and see which.