Behind an unassuming gate off Field Road stands SF-88, kept much as it looked when crews here watched the skies for Soviet bombers. The exhibit follows the leap from the conventional Ajax to the nuclear-tipped Hercules — a weapon never fired in combat — and on open days volunteers hoist a real missile up from its underground magazine into daylight. Access is tightly limited and the posted hours don't always match, so ring ahead before you count on getting in.
Just off Field Road, behind a plain chain-link gate, sits one of the strangest survivors in these hills. It doesn't look like much from the road — a fence, a guard shack, some low buildings and a flat apron of asphalt. But this is Nike Missile Site SF-88, and it's said to be the only fully restored Cold War Nike base in the country. When it's open, that is. Keep your eyes on the road here; the site tells its own story whether the gate happens to be swung wide or not.
Think back to the 1950s. The country was bracing for waves of Soviet bombers coming over the pole, and the answer was a ring of guided-missile batteries thrown up around cities like San Francisco. This one went active in the mid-fifties. In its early years it fielded the Nike Ajax, a conventional missile carrying a high-explosive warhead — no atom in it. Then came the bigger, faster Nike Hercules, and that one could carry the W-31 nuclear warhead, dialed to roughly two, twenty, or forty kilotons depending on the mission. For the better part of two decades, crews stood ready around the clock. Not one of these missiles was ever fired at an enemy. The site stood down in the seventies, and the Park Service took it on afterward to keep the memory honest.
The showstopper, when a tour is running, is down in the magazine. Volunteers — many of them veterans who served on Nike crews — raise an actual Hercules up out of its underground bunker on a hydraulic elevator, the same kind of lift that once carried these missiles to the surface. It rises out of the ground right in front of you. There's nothing else quite like it.
Here's the catch: the hours are strictly limited, and honestly the schedules you'll find don't always agree. The one you can count on is the first-Saturday Veterans Open House, and even that can close in bad weather. So before you plan a stop, check ahead — call the site at four one five, three three one, one five four zero — and confirm it's open the day you're coming. Roll on easy from here; there's more of the Headlands still ahead.
Photo: Jeff Keyzer from Austin, TX, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0
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