First off, if anyone knows of any cool tunnels under San Francisco, please let me know, because I've been wanting to explore something like that since I was a kid. (Quick plug: if you're ever in Seattle, check out the Underground Tour, it's super awesome. I'm sure there must be stuff like that under SF but they don't let anyone at it.)

I would have gone for the subway tunnels, but it's been done, and done quite well, so to hell with that.

Have you ever been to Fisherman's Wharf and realized that the sidewalk you're walking on or the restaurant you're eating in is sitting on a very large and well-paved pier that is somehow floating above the water? Well, it stands to reason that there's some space down there to explore, so I checked the tide tables and headed down to the water at low tide, determined to find a way underneath the street.

My first target was the Hyde St Pier. (Another quick plug: first Saturday night of each month is sea shanty night there and it's super awesome, you should check it out.) I knew from memory that there was a little beach off to one side of it -- could you walk from the beach to underneath the pier? Turns out, no, there's a fence that goes from the bottom of the pier into the sand, and I didn't feel like trying to tunnel underneath it. Scratch that.

But if you go around the OTHER side...



It was pretty cool down there, and if the sand wasn't super-wet and mucky it'd be a really nice place to sit and listen to the waves. Unfortunately, they have it under some kind of surveillance, because I'd been down there for all of three minutes when a nice ranger showed up and told me to get lost. I did.

So I kept walking down the wharf, looking for another place where I could explore the underside of what I was walking on. I found a few ladders hanging off the side (really scary rusty ladders -- don't try this at home, kids) and climbed down them to see what I could see, but there was noplace to stand down there and nothing worth taking pictures of.

Eventually, though, I found a little walkway going to nowhere that ended right by some concrete fill that looked walkable. I hopped the railing, picked my way over the rubble, and before I knew it I was in something that really felt like an underworld. It was the sort of place I would have expected to find a homeless encampment, except that it obviously would have been underwater at high tide; as it was I barely had room to crawl around above the water line.



I initially planned to just poke around a bit, take some pictures, and head back the way I came, but my flashlight kept pointing out more places I could get to, so I kept pressing ahead. Eventually I came out on the other side with a vaguely convenient ladder. The ladder was only vaguely convenient because not one but two chain-link fences were between it and the public street. As a result, I have no photos of my egress, although judging by the flash that went off as I was clambering over the second fence, a security camera somewhere probably does.