Point Reyes Lighthouse

Point Reyes runs ten miles out into the Pacific across the approach to San Francisco, and for as long as ships have come this way it has wrecked them. Getting a light built here took years of lobbying, and the builders had to learn what the coast already knew: a lamp on top of the headland sat inside the high summer fog and showed nothing. So they blasted a shelf about three hundred feet down the cliff face and set the tower there, below the fog.

The tower is short — sixteen-sided, iron plate bolted to the rock — because the cliff supplied the height. Its first-order Fresnel lens, made in France in 1867, first shone on December 1, 1870, flashing every five seconds as a falling weight drove the clockwork. A keeper wound that clockwork through the night, and on foggy days the crew shoveled about 140 pounds of coal an hour into the boiler of the steam fog signal below. The Coast Guard's own record calls the station the windiest and foggiest on the Pacific coast.

When the San Andreas moved on April 18, 1906, the lens slipped off its track. Thirteen minutes later the light was working again. It was retired in 1975.

The way down is more than three hundred steps on the face of the bluff, and the way back up is all of them.