Point Reyes Lighthouse

Where it sits. The Point Reyes Lighthouse clings to a ledge near the tip of the Point Reyes headland in Marin County, at the far western end of a peninsula that juts ten miles into the Pacific about 30 miles north-west of San Francisco. The drive out along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard from the park headquarters at Bear Valley covers roughly 21 miles of dairy ranch, treeless grassland and cypress windbreaks before the road simply ends at a car park on the cliff. From there a path leads to the headland's edge and a stairway drops to the light station below.

The story behind it. This headland is one of the deadliest pieces of coast in California — a granite finger set directly across the shipping approach to San Francisco, wrapped in fog for a large part of the year. After a long sequence of wrecks, the Lighthouse Board built a station here and first lit it on 1 December 1870. The engineering decision that defines the place was vertical: because fog on this coast sits in a layer above the water, a tower on the clifftop would have been invisible for much of the year, so the station was built 300 feet down the cliff face, below the fog and level with the ships. The tower itself is therefore short and squat, sixteen-sided, made of iron plate and anchored into the rock, with a keepers' compound, fog signal building and hoist house terraced around it.

The mechanism. The light carried a first-order Fresnel lens built in France by Barbier and Fenestre, more than six feet across, made up of 24 flash panels holding over a thousand hand-ground glass prisms. It floated on a bed of chariot wheels and was turned by a clockwork train driven by a heavy weight descending a shaft inside the tower, which the keeper wound by hand every two hours and twenty minutes through the night. The Coast Guard automated the station in 1975, installing a rotating aero-beacon on a lower platform, but the original lens was left in place and restored, and it remains the reason the tower is worth the stairs.

The weather, which is the attraction. Point Reyes has a serious claim to being the windiest place on the Pacific coast of the United States and the foggiest place on the North American continent — around 2,700 hours of fog in an average year, and recorded gusts well beyond 100 miles per hour. The headland also sits on the Pacific Plate, west of the San Andreas Fault, which runs up the peninsula's eastern side beneath Tomales Bay; in the earthquake of 18 April 1906 the entire point lurched roughly 20 feet north-west, an offset still visible in a broken fence line on the Earthquake Trail near Bear Valley.

On screen. The Fog (1980), John Carpenter's ghost story about a coastal town's buried crime, used this stretch of Marin and Sonoma coast for its fictional Antonio Bay, and the Point Reyes Lighthouse plays the isolated station from which Stevie Wayne broadcasts as the fog rolls in. The exteriors — the cliff, the stair, the lantern room — are the real place, and Carpenter's crew worked around the same wind that makes the site memorable in person. Interiors of the radio station and much of the fog effects work were built and staged elsewhere, with the neighbouring communities of Inverness, Point Reyes Station and Bodega Bay supplying the town. The headland's other screen work is largely documentary, natural history and advertising, since the park's protected status and the exposure of the site limit large-scale production.

What you actually see today. From the visitor car park a level path of about 0.4 miles crosses the headland to the lighthouse visitor centre and an overlook. Beyond that, 313 steps descend the cliff to the tower — the equivalent of a thirty-storey building, and the climb back is the part people underestimate. The overlook alone is worth the walk: sheer cliffs, kelp beds, a colony of common murres on the rocks, and in winter and spring a steady traffic of grey whales passing close to the point. Chimney Rock, a short drive back along the road, holds an elephant seal colony from December to March and one of the best spring wildflower displays in the region, and the tule elk herd at Tomales Point is a separate trip up the peninsula.

Getting there and timing. The stairway and lower station open Friday through Monday, roughly 10am to 4:30pm, and close whenever sustained winds pass about 40 miles per hour, which happens often — check the park's status before driving out. On winter and early spring weekends during the whale and elk seasons, the last stretch of road is closed to private cars and a shuttle runs from Drakes Beach. January through April is the season for whales and elephant seals; late spring brings wildflowers on the headland; summer is the foggiest and often the least rewarding. Bring a windproof layer regardless of the month, and allow a full day from San Francisco, since the drive alone is around two hours each way.