Point Reyes National Seashore Self Guided Driving Audio Tour

Welcome to Point Reyes National Seashore! This National Park has miles of unbelievable beach vistas, incredible stories of those who lived here, and of course… that famous Point Reyes Lighthouse way down at the tip of it all. Let’s get started! Note: The tour is over 21 miles long, with more than 53 audio stories, and takes about 2-3 hours to complete. Buy once, use for one year! Ideal for extended visits and return trips over the next 12 months.

Just ahead, we’ll have the option to detour to the remote and windswept beaches of Tomales Point, one of the most popular destinations on the peninsula. The detour takes 45 minutes round trip. You’ll also want to budget a little time for walking around and taking photos

The Drakes Estero is coming up soon. If you’re wondering what an Estero is -- don’t worry. It’s just a fancy term for a marshy inlet. If you’d like to walk a 2.5 mile round-trip trail through the estero, there’s a trailhead just ahead. I’ll point it out. In a minute, you’ll cross coastal grasslands and enjoy a scenic footbridge stretching over the bay.

If you’d like to hike the Drakes Estero Trail, turn left. Otherwise, continue driving.

Check out all of those cyprus trees ahead! That’s our next stop. The trees form a sort of tunnel. Where does it go? To the historic KPH Radio station! Uhh.. random, right? In the early 1900s, Morse code radio stations went up all up and down the United States coast. The Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, figured out where these stations should be to properly and efficiently communicate with ships at sea. One of the spots RCA chose was right here at Point Reyes! In 1929, they built the station, but they wanted to do justice to the beautiful landscape surrounding it. So they planted rows of cypress trees leading up to the new station.

Coming up soon is Point Reyes Beach, boasting 11 miles of sand and fabulous ocean views. To make it even better, people often report gray whale sightings from this beach in the winter and spring!

Coming up soon is Drakes Beach. It’s a popular beach amongst visitors here because it faces Drakes Bay. That means the winds aren’t as strong and the waves aren’t as intense as on the ocean-facing side. The beach boasts some white sandstone cliffs as a backdrop too.

To take a quick detour to the lifesaving station, see an overlook for elephant seals, and hike to Chimney Rock for ocean views, turn left at the fork.

The first life-saving station in Point Reyes sat on a plot of ranch land very close to the point at the end of this peninsula. It began operations in 1878. The station leader was called the “keeper”; the staff were called “surfmen.” They’d patrol the beaches looking for wrecks and listening for voices through the fog. And the system worked! That first station saved people from 14 major shipwrecks over the 37 years it was there.

Hundreds of thousands of northern elephant seals used to call the Pacific Ocean home. But then European settlers discovered they could use the seal blubber for oil. And by 1892, only around 75 individual seals were left up and down the entire coast of North America. Down from hundreds of thousands! Mexico and the US Government federally protected them in the 1920s, and thank goodness: the elephant seal population slowly boomed once again! In 1981, the first breeding pair was back at Point Reyes. And now, there are somewhere around 200,000 northern elephant seals along the Pacific Coast of the US and Mexico.

Coming up in just a moment will be Sea Lion Overlook. Here, 54 steps lead down to a coastal view you won’t soon forget… because it’s usually overflowing with sea lions! But how do we tell seals and sea lions apart? To identify one, check for ear flaps and folded-in back flippers. Sea lions use these back flippers to shuffle upright when trying to move on land. Males are about 8 feet long and females about 6 feet. Breeding season for sea lions is between May and August. During this time, the sea lions stay on the beach for as long as possible, defending their territory. This requires them to fast, and use their accumulated blubber to sustain them for months. They vie for females through calls, barks, and territorial fights with other males. For the rest of the year, sea lions roam the ocean, feeding. Females have a 12-month gestation period, usually giving birth in June or July

We’re coming up on the parking lot to see the South Beach Overlook and the Point Reyes Lighthouse. This is the only parking lot for the lighthouse, so I’d recommend parking once we get there. You can park on the street too, if the lot is full, but street parking near the lighthouse gets a little congested, especially if you’re here on a weekend.

Pretty soon, we’ll see a little tunnel of cypress trees not unlike the cypress tunnel by the radio station we saw earlier. They’re easy to spot because, as you may have noticed, there are very few trees here! If you cross under the tunnel of trees that bends toward the side of the hill and just beyond, you’ll see what people call the Leaning Tree. It’s a cypress that leans over the path, but doesn’t seem to ever fall.