Red Rock Island

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Red Rock is visible adjacent to the bridge in this photograph taken from an airplane (Daniel McCirmick, 2006)

Aerial photograph of Red Rock Island

Red Rock Island is an uninhabited island in the San Francisco Bay located just south of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

This unique property is the only privately owned island in San Francisco Bay. The boundaries of three counties – San Francisco, Marin and Contra Costa – converge on this high rock, a fact that has always made any entrepreneurial fantasies about the island problematic.

The mountain of bright red earth and rock is 500 feet across from east to west, 750 feet from north and south, and rises out of the Bay to a height of 172 feet. Its area total is almost 6 acres. It is surrounded by some of the deepest water in the North Bay - 60 feet deep.

It is 8 miles across the Bay to Fisherman's Wharf, 20 minutes by boat to Sausalito, and only a short hop to the Richmond Yacht Club. The sweeping 360 degree view from the top gives you the skylines of San Francisco and Oakland to the South, Richmond and the Berkeley Hills to the East, Marin County with Mount Tamalpais to the West and the Richmond Bridge with San Pablo Bay to the North.

In the 1980s, one developer proposed lopping off the top half of the island and constructing a 10-story hotel with a casino on the first floor. The island’s lee side, facing the bridge, would have been turned into a small yacht harbor, with water and power running off of lines attached to the bridge. (The developer even had a good use for the waste material from construction: The island rock, once mined for manganese, meets state highway specs for the roadbed material used in highway construction.)

However, there was no way that the three counties, the State of California, environmentalists or neighboring school districts would have ever come together on this. The would-be developer long ago moved to Southeast Asia and Red Rock remains an interesting sideshow at the halfway point of a high-speed crossing.