Point Reyes

Fog rolls in from the Pacific and wraps the headland in grey cotton, muffling everything: the lighthouse foghorn, the elephant seals barking on the beach below, the creak of the oyster boats in Tomales Bay. The grass on the bluffs bends permanently landward, shaped by decades of wind. When the fog lifts, the coastline appears in sharp focus: white cliffs, dark sand, tule elk grazing above the surf.

Point Reyes National Seashore, the West Coast's only, occupies a triangular peninsula north of San Francisco that rides the Pacific Plate, sliding past the rest of California along the San Andreas Fault, whose drowned valley is Tomales Bay. In the 1906 earthquake the peninsula lurched about twenty feet northward in moments; a split fence on the Earthquake Trail still marks the offset. The lighthouse sits at the bottom of 308 steps on the windiest point of the headland, and from there and Chimney Rock gray whales pass within view between December and May, while elephant seals haul out below in winter. Tule elk, reintroduced in the late 1970s after vanishing from the coast, graze the Tomales Point headlands, and over 1,500 species of plants and animals share the fog line between the breakers and the forested ridges.