Fireworks in the fog

Date: 2026-07-04

Submitted: 2026-07-08 21:50:41

Visibility: World-readable

Watching fireworks launched from the Golden Gate Bridge into the fog for an auspicious anniversary

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the city of San Francisco decided to launch fireworks from the city's most iconic symbol, the Golden Gate Bridge. (Only twice before have fireworks been launched from the bridge itself, to celebrate the bridge's 50th and 75th birthday.) Leading up to the event the weather forecast looked grim, with a good chance that most or all of the fireworks would be obscured by San Francisco's second-most-iconic symbol, the fog. Kiesa and Julian were away for the weekend, and Calvin passed on this once-in-a-generation opportunity, so I headed up to San Francisco by myself to see the show.

My first stop in San Francisco on the afternoon of the Fourth of July was Dolores Park. On the way there I caught a glimpse of Sutro Tower rising out of a bright white bank of fog above Twin Peaks. It was sunny in the Mission (usually the warmest neighborhood in the city, in the fog shadow of the hills in the middle of the city and further from the bay than the neighborhoods further east), but I took this as an inauspicious sign of things to come.

I picked up ice cream at Bi-Rite then walked down the street to find a place to sit in Dolores Park to eat. The park was comfortably full of people, with vendors walking through the crowd hawking refreshments. I sat in the grass, eating my ice cream, enjoying the summer day, then headed to the Marina to watch fireworks.

The most direct way to get from the Mission to the Marina was the 22-Fillmore bus, but the buses serving the route were already stuck in traffic in the Marina. (Google Maps' bus tracking in San Francisco is sketchy at best; it often leads me astray when there's any disruption to the published bus timetables. The real-time bus tracking on SFMTA's website is quite good, but it's hard to navigate on a phone. This probably means I need to find a better bus schedule service for my phone, but I don't have this problem quite often enough to need a better solution.) Rather than wait 15 minutes for the very-delayed bus, I walked a few blocks north to Market Street and caught a MUNI metro train a few stops inbound to Powell, where MUNI was staging a special fireworks shuttle to the Marina. There was some confusion among the SFMTA employees in high-visibility vests about where the line was supposed to be (it appeared that I ended up in the shorter line). Before too long an articulated bus pulled up to the curb and the people in line made a desperate rush to get on the bus. I ended up standing right at the front of the bus, just behind the driver, trying awkwardly to grab an inconveniently-placed railing for support as the bus lurched forward, heading in the general direction of the Marina after looping around in the wrong direction to get to Geary. The driver was theoretically supposed to keep picking up passengers on the route all the way to the Marina, but the bus was packed standing-room-only so after a few stops he asked to skip every following stop. Here we actually got to use the red bus-only lanes on Geary and Van Ness to their fullest advantage, without slowing down and stopping every block or two.

The bus dropped us off on Chestnut at Fillmore, around the side of the Marina Middle School. The last two blocks before the bus let us out were crowded with cars, unable to make forward progress in the crush of traffic. The marine layer formed high clouds above; on the ground the air was cool with the lightest hint of breeze coming east down the street. The sidewalks were packed with people, going every direction, crowding into restaurants and cafes. In the street traffic crawled to a halt, waiting for a gap in the endless stream of people in the crosswalks ahead of them. Cars that misjudged their moment got stuck in the middle of intersections, blocking the box and and getting honked at for their troubles. It was complete mayhem; but it was also kind of fun, as a sort-of sociological experiment I had voluntarily joined which I was simultaneously participating in and also observing.

My plan had been to eat supper in the Marina, at a conveniently-located Super Duper a few blocks away. This seemed like it might be problematic given the crowds in the Marina, and the line stretching out the door to order at the kiosk inside. I spent about 20 minutes in line, then another 30 minutes waiting for my burger. When at last I heard my order number I pushed my way through the crowd to the pick-up counter, then took my food outside, to the somewhat-less-crowded sidewalk, to head to Crissy Field before eating.

I walked past the Palace of Fine Arts, crossed a gridlocked Marina Boulevard, walked down Mason Street past the entrance to the Crissy Field parking lots, around the south side of the marsh, and past Tunnel Tops. By the time I reached Mason Street the roads were mostly closed, so traffic thinned out; but I could still see a long line of slow-moving cars on US 101 heading between the Marina and the Golden Gate Bridge. Beyond the end of the marsh I reached the grassy expanse of Crissy Field, where people had set up camp chairs and were waiting for the fireworks. I kept walking until I reached the beach, with an uninterrupted view of the Golden Gate, and the thick layer of fog hanging just above the deck of the bridge.

I set up my camp chair and camera tripod on the beach at the edge of the bay and ate my supper. As I watched the bridge the bottom of the fog moved a bit on the bridge; sometimes I could see as high as the second crossbar on the south tower. People stood on Torpedo Wharf, close to the bridge. I could see the entire bridge deck all the way across, but almost nothing of the north tower, and very little of the hills in Marin County. There was a bit of light coming under the fog in the bay beyond Sausalito.

A sailboat sat at anchor off the beach flying a large American flag from the mast. A Coast Guard cutter cruised on the other side of the channel in front of Richardson Bay. Police boats cruised back and forth along the shipping channel with their lights flashing. Alcatraz lurked in the water under the ominous fog.

Sunset on the bay was 20:35, but it was impossible to tell a difference under the thick layer of fog. At some point I noticed the street lights on the bridge had come on, and spotlights illuminated the bridge towers. I saw flashing lights going back and forth across the bridge. Headlights approached the bridge from the north, and taillights approached the bridge from the south. The bridge wasn't scheduled to close to traffic until 21:00, but US 101 looked gridlocked and it wasn't clear how much traffic was going to get through.

At 21:00 I could see Sausalito's fireworks show across the bay. All of the shells were visible under the marine layer, but it was far enough away that the biggest explosions were tiny bright splotches in the distance, hard to notice and easy to miss unless I was looking right at them, unable to capture my attention for very long before my gaze wandered to the people waiting on the beach.

After civil twilight ended, just after 21:00, it started getting dark quickly. The clouds reflected the lights below. I moved forward on the beach to get a better view, closer to the gently lapping waves at the edge of the bay, and set up my SLR camera on my tripod for the show. It was too dark for the autofocus to work, and I couldn't see clearly enough through the optical viewfinder to focus the camera. I could get an acceptable focus by enabling the live camera on the LCD viewfinder, which was big enough that I could tell when the lights resolved themselves into the smallest possible point.

Someone sitting near me on the beach started singing "Oh Canada".

Behind me, in the dunes above the beach, someone set off informal fireworks. I was worried they might be the best fireworks we saw that night.

A minute before the show was scheduled to start, the bridge's fog horn sounded. Everyone on the beach took this as the sign that the show was about to start; they turned their attention to the bridge, and many stood up to get a better view. The lights on the bridge went out, leaving only the red aviation caution lights on the cables. And then the fireworks started, with a string of shells fired from the length of the bridge deck between the towers, which promptly climbed into the fog and exploded out of view.

Some of the fireworks launched from the bridge in sequence, running down the length of the bridge, eliciting at least one "oooh" from the crowd, as we appreciated the precision of the launch and could imagine what the display would look like if we could only see it. Some of the fireworks launched from the bridge towers themselves; but they were launched at the same height as the bottom of the fog so they quickly disappeared from view. Sometimes the fireworks gave off enough light that they shone through the fog in a blazing flash right in front of the bridge, as if they were intending to illuminate the bridge itself in a parody of "The Star Spangled Banner".

More fireworks launched from a barge in the bay almost directly in front of me. Depending on the size of the shell I might see more or less of the explosion under the fog.

Although much of the fireworks show was lost on us, because we couldn't see most of the fireworks through the fog, I could still see some of the show, and the overall experience was good; though much of that is because I saw the whole thing as an Experience. It would have been a great show, if only we'd been able to see it.

After fifteen minutes the show was over. I packed up my stuff, returning my camp chair to my backpack and mounting the tripod on the side of the pack (using the same side straps that I've used to carry skis while hiking to terrain only accessible on foot).

I walked back along the beach, on a strip of sand between the gentle lapping of the water at the edge of the bay and the city to my right, backlit by the amber light glowing off the fog. The dome of the Palace of Fine Arts loomed in the middle distance, serving as a waypoint as I made my way back to the city and towards home.

Actually getting home proved easier said than done. I stopped to use the restroom at Crissy Field, then picked my way through the gridlocked parking lot and followed the crowds of people walking generally into the city. Marina Boulevard still looked like a disaster, along with every street heading south or east. I found a long line of MUNI buses waiting on Chestnut to serve as fireworks shuttles to carry people back to Powell, but Fillmore Street right in front of the middle school was completely blocked so the buses couldn't move. I walked several blocks east on Chestnut, along the even longer line of people waiting to board the buses. By the time I reached Laguna the line of people snaked around the park to the left. I figured my best way out would be to walk two miles down Van Ness to Civic Center and catch BART from there.

I was not the only person who looked at the crowds and decided to walk; the sidewalks on both sides of Van Ness were full of people heading in the same direction. By the time I made it to Van Ness traffic was beginning to move, but it was still slow. The protected busway in the middle of the street was not enough to move buses especially fast; I kept pace (on foot) with a pair of #49 buses for a couple of blocks. I finally reached Civic Center shortly before midnight, almost an hour after leaving the Marina; and I still had to contend with crowds of people in the BART station as I caught a train to where I'd parked at Daly City; and then I still had to drive more than an hour home.

This was not the Golden Gate Bridge fireworks experience that anyone intended, but I still had an experience and I'm glad I went.