There are only two lighthouses between here and the Bay Area you can actually walk into, and this day gets you both, with ninety miles of some of the best coastline in California in between.
We’ll head south first while everyone’s fresh. Ten minutes at the Albion River Bridge, which is the last wooden trestle bridge on Highway 1 and a beautiful thing to look at, then twenty on the bluff at Elk for the sea stacks, which are enormous and worth the stop on their own. Point Arena is the tall one, the tallest lighthouse you’re allowed to climb on the West Coast, a hundred and forty-odd steps to a view that goes forever, and a museum on the ground floor with the original Fresnel lens in it if stairs aren’t your idea of a holiday. It came down in the 1906 earthquake and went back up in reinforced concrete, which makes a good deal of sense once you know the San Andreas runs out to sea five miles up the road. Then a proper sit-down lunch in town.
Coming home we’ll stop at Manchester for a short flat walk toward the beach, and finish at Point Cabrillo, which is the opposite of Point Arena in every way and just as good. A small, perfect 1909 station with its lens still turning after all this time, a restored lightkeeper’s house, and a docent who’ll tell you everything.
It’s a beautiful, easy day, and you can have all of it without climbing a single step if you’d rather not.
