48 Islands*, 5 years, 3 different girlfriends, 220 pictures of 400 chosen from 600 rolls of film, tons of birds, 3 ghost towns, puns, jokes, and more than a few characters, our evening with James Marten was a fantastic trip around San Francisco Bay.
He quizzed the crowd on our birds and came away impressed with our knowledge, but he left us with some great images, and lots of new tidbits of fact and lore covering a fair swath of our Bay’s natural and unnatural history: an 11,000 year old horse tooth, 4,000 year old shell mounds, hideouts from the Spanish, sunken wooden ships, a wild west town, towns passed by the times, rock quarries, a world’s fair, an immigration station, a lighthouse, military bases, industrial salt manufacturing, utilities, private islands, to nature preserves and wildlife sanctuaries. All of these populated by a rich set of characters that have left their names in the landscape. Some of the stories James told came after his travels around the bay, he keeps learning new things as he travels around showing the photos, like the story of the man who waters a tree on the only remaining private island in the bay: Red Rock.
You can find a lot of this and 400 beautiful pictures in this book: The Islands of San Francisco Bay.
* Two of the 48 islands are now flooded. And in case you were wonder — by island, James Marten refers to places officially recognized as islands.
** The picture in this post is by James A. Marten, from Chapter 9 of his book The Islands of San Francisco Bay.
SF Natural History Series 