Have a foggy time at Point Reyes

Take a winding road up a mountain in Point Reyes, a cape on the coast of northern California. Stop and look out over thick forests of giant redwood trees. Watch a blanket of fog sweep in over the Pacific Ocean and the sunset turn the sky golden. Then spend the evening enjoying live music at one of the nearby towns.


Point Reyes is about 50 kilometres north of San Francisco and is a great place to go hiking, do water sports and enjoy the beauty of nature. You can take trails through forests, mountains and fields, spend a day at the beach or go kayaking in Tomales Bay. Watch birds in their natural habitat and deer grazing on the mountains. In the winter you can see the Northern Elephant Seals come ashore.

Sometimes the fog in Point Reyes is so thick that it’s almost impossible to see more than a few inches in any direction. So it's no wonder director John Carpenter went there to make his famous 1980 film The Fog, about a fog that sweeps in over a small town in California, bringing with it the vengeful ghosts of mariners who died in a shipwreck there 100 years earlier.

You can take the 300 steps down to the Point Reyes Lighthouse and visit the town of Inverness, which are both in the film. And don’t forget to stop at the town of Olema, which was the epicentre of the earthquake that destroyed the city of San Francisco in 1906.

See the Point Reyes Lighthouse in this trailer for The Fog: