A Weekend Itinerary for Point Reyes and Tomales Bay

Point Reyes feels like the edge of the world, and that is exactly why it makes the perfect weekend escape from the city. Ninety minutes and a lifetime away, this is where the Bay Area goes to breathe. It is also, at this moment, a park in the middle of the largest change in its history. Under a settlement announced in January 2025, twelve of the fourteen ranches inside the seashore agreed to end operations, and some seventeen thousand acres that sat behind barbed wire for generations are opening to the public as the fences come down. You are visiting during the transition, and you will see it: vacant dairies, gates standing open, hillsides empty of the cattle that held them for a century.

Start Saturday early. The drive out through West Marin is half the pleasure, so take Sir Francis Drake Boulevard slowly and stop for coffee in Point Reyes Station. Then head for the cypress tunnel at 17400 Sir Francis Drake, where two rows of Monterey cypress arch over a road running out to an old maritime radio station — a cathedral of trees that photographers plan entire trips around. The gate opens at six. Arrive before the crowds and you may have it to yourself.

Then drive west to the lighthouse, and go before lunch rather than at golden hour. This is the detail most itineraries get wrong. The visitor center and the staircase are open Thursday through Monday only, ten to four, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the stairs shut altogether whenever the wind tops forty miles an hour — which out here is often. From the parking lot it is a four-tenths-of-a-mile walk to the visitor center, and from there more than three hundred steps down to the light itself, perched at the windiest point on the West Coast. The grounds and the observation deck stay open all day, so a late arrival is not a wasted one. But if you want the stairs, you want the morning.

Spend the rest of the afternoon on the headlands — Chimney Rock, the elephant seal overlook, the long empty sweep of South Beach — or drop down to Limantour and walk until the fog decides what it is doing.

Sunday belongs to the elk and the oysters. Drive out Pierce Point Road to the old ranch at the end and walk north toward Tomales Point, where the tule elk spent nearly fifty years penned inside a two-mile fence. That fence is gone. The Park Service removed it and abandoned a plan to cap the herd by shooting, and the elk are free to move across the whole peninsula for the first time since they were reintroduced here in 1978. The full trail runs nine and a half miles round trip, exposed the entire way, and it is worth every step — but you do not have to finish it. The elk are often in the first mile or two, silhouetted on the bluffs above the Pacific, the fog moving like a living thing, and hardly another soul once you are past the trailhead.

Then come back down and around to the east side of the bay for what may be the best meal of the weekend. Hog Island's general store in Marshall opens at nine, and if you book a picnic table you can buy them by the dozen and shuck them yourself with lemon and hot sauce and something cold, sitting at the edge of the water while the bay does nothing in particular. There are not many places on earth with this feeling. And if you would rather trade the hike for cheese, Point Reyes Farmstead on Shoreline Highway pours tastings and runs tours by appointment only from eleven — call ahead, because you will not get in otherwise.

If there is time before the drive home, paddle the calm bay by kayak, or simply sit on the shore and watch the light change. Point Reyes does not ask you to do much. It asks you to notice — and this year, more than most, there is a great deal worth noticing.