USA West Coast — LA + Vegas + SF

About this pack

Hollywood, Vegas Strip, Golden Gate, Pacific Coast drive.

Inside the USA West Coast — LA + Vegas + SF trip

This trip opens in Los Angeles, California's most populous city and the commercial, financial, and cultural centre of Southern California, with an estimated 3.87 million residents within city limits, the second-most populous city in the United States after New York. The city anchors a metropolitan area of 12.9 million people and is the largest city in the Western United States, known for its ethnically and culturally diverse population and its role as a global centre of the entertainment industry.

In Hollywood, the trip walks Hollywood Boulevard, running east-west between the Hollywood Hills and Los Feliz through the Hollywood, East Hollywood, Little Armenia, and Thai Town districts. Part of the boulevard began as Prospect Avenue, a dusty road connected to Los Angeles by a new railroad completed in 1900, and the fifteen blocks between La Brea Avenue and Gower Street, part of the Hollywood Boulevard Commercial and Entertainment District listed on the National Register of Historic Places, now make up the Hollywood Walk of Fame, close to the Ovation Hollywood complex and its Dolby Theatre.

From Los Angeles, the trip reaches the Las Vegas Strip, a roughly 4.2-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard in Clark County, Nevada, known for its concentration of resort hotels and casinos. Immediately south of the Las Vegas city limits in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester, the Strip is what most visitors picture when they think of Las Vegas, even though it sits technically outside the city itself.

A detour reaches the Grand Canyon, a canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona running 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and more than a mile deep. Contained partly within Grand Canyon National Park along with the Kaibab National Forest and several Indigenous reservations, the canyon exposes nearly two billion years of Earth's geological history in its walls, a sequence of uplifted Proterozoic and Paleozoic rock that has made it one of the most studied landscapes in North American geology; President Theodore Roosevelt was an early advocate for preserving the area, visiting it repeatedly to hunt and take in the scenery.

The trip closes in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bridge, a suspension bridge across the mile-wide strait linking San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, connecting the city to Marin County and carrying both U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1. Recognised by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Wonders of the Modern World, the bridge grew out of a proposal first floated in a 1916 newspaper article by the engineering student James Wilkins; before the bridge existed, ferries had carried passengers across the strait since as early as 1820, eventually consolidating into the Southern Pacific-Golden Gate Ferries, once the largest ferry operation in the world. The engineer Joseph Strauss, who took up the challenge of designing a more achievable bridge after the City Engineer judged an earlier proposal impractical, had by then already completed some 400 drawbridges, though nothing previously on the scale of the span that would eventually cross the Golden Gate.

• Los Angeles — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Hollywood Boulevard — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Las Vegas Strip — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Grand Canyon — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Golden Gate Bridge — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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USA West Coast — LA + Vegas + SF, in frame

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