Golden Gate

This article is about the strait in California. For other uses see Golden Gate (disambiguation).

The Golden Gate

The Golden Gate, looking south towards San Francisco. San Francisco Bay is on the left, and the Pacific Ocean is on the right
This image is from the GIMP photo archive.

The Golden Gate is the strait connecting the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Since the 1930s it has been spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge.

Great tidal flows added with the combined flows of the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River have scoured a channel several hundred feet deep through the strait.

Before the arrival of Europeans in the 18th century, the area around the strait and the bay was inhabited by the Ohlone people. The strait was surprisingly elusive for early European explorers, presumably due to its persistent summer fog. The strait is not recorded in the voyages of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo nor Francis Drake, both of whom may have explored the nearby coast in the 16th century in search of the Northwest Passage. The strait is also unrecorded in observation by several Spanish galleons returning from the Philippines that laid up in nearby Drakes Bay. These galleons often passed west of the Farallon Islands (27 miles west of the Golden Gate), fearing the possibility of rocks between the Islands and the mainland.

The first recorded observation of the strait was nearly two hundred years later in 1769, by Sgt. José Francisco Ortega, the leader of a scouting party sent north along the peninsula of present-day San Francisco. Ortega reported that he could proceed no further because of the strait. On 5 August 1775 Juan de Ayala and the crew of his ship the San Carlos became the first Europeans known to have passed through the strait, anchoring in a bay of California which is now named in Ayala's honor. Until the 1840s the strait was called the "Boca del Puerto de San Francisco" (Mouth of the Port of San Francisco). Sometime in the 1840s, before the discovery of gold in California, the entrance acquired a new name. In his memoirs, John C. Frémont wrote, "To this Gate I gave the name of Chrysopylae, or GOLDEN GATE; for the same reasons that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras, or GOLDEN HORN."

During the summer, the heat in the California Central Valley causes the air there to rise. This can create strong winds which pull cool moist air in from over the ocean through the break in the hills caused by the Golden Gate, commonly causing a stream of dense fog to enter the bay.

The strait is located at 37°49′N 122°29′W.

References

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