Point Arena Lighthouse-2

When traveling north from Point Reyes, the next prominent point along the California coast is reached after sixty-eight miles. Known by early explorers as Punta Barro de Arena, Spanish for Sand Bar Point, the feature is now known simply as Point Arena. Here, the coast changes from running in a northwesterly direction to more of a northerly direction, and as ship traffic carrying redwood lumber from Northern California to San Francisco increased in the 1850s and 1860s, so did the need for a light to mark this critical turning point. It was first built in 1870, destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (the San Andreas Fault lies within a mile of the lighthouse) and was rebuilt. Today it is the highest lighthouse along the Pacific Coast.