Trail Name: Alamere Falls via Coast Trail from Palomarin Trailhead
Date Hiked: 11/21/20
Area: San Francisco Bay Area, Bolinas
Mileage: 13.8 total
Elevation Gain: 1,955 ft
NOTE: This is NOT just a coastal beach hike, Emily and I were both amazed at how much bio-diversity we saw along the way: mossy forests, several lakes, coastal bluffs, scrub, rocky forest hills, and beach. We did NOT take the “shortcut”, which is clearly marked with a stone arrow pointing toward some poison oak. The shortcut would have made this an 8-9 mile trail and it contains a sort of bouldering/climbing descent near the falls. Instead, we were looking for a longer hike and we wanted to see Wildcat camp, so we did the whole out-and-back trail.
Alamere Falls is a coastal waterfall on the Point Reyes National Seashore, do I have to say more to convince you to go see it?
Alamere Falls! It’s a really unique coastal waterfall.
Emily and I had Alamere Falls on a list for quite some time. Originally in 2018 we were going to backpack to Wildcat camp and enjoy Alamere Falls, but in that particularly wet year we had just spent a rainy weekend in Big Basin Redwoods State Park and when the forecast showed cold rain, we called it off.
Rather than waiting to get lucky with a permit for camping, we decided to make Alamere Falls a long day hike. As is our custom, we packed up our oats in glass mason jars and ate them at the trailhead. It’s always fun to sit and enjoy nature while having breakfast – not to mention it gets us out of the house much quicker!
Away we go! (Pit toilets are immediately to the left of the trailhead)
At 13.8 miles total, this was a long trail for us, but over the course of that 13.8 it offers so much. The trail gradually leads up through a wooded hillock and a cypress? grove up to your first coastal bluff views of the trail. It was such a rewarding way to start the hike and really motivated us to see the rest of the trail.
Pro Tip: There’s a picnic table on the bluff (less than 0.5 into the trail), which would’ve been an ideal spot to have breakfast.
If we could do it over, this bluff with a picnic table at mile 0.5 was perfect for breakfast
From here the trail is really interesting, it winds back and forth through coastal scrub/bluffs and into wooded hillocks with some really unique trail cover. You’ll see forested hills that look a lot like the Matt Davis Trail leading up to Mt. Tam, and some super cool tree-tunnel-thingies.
The aforementioned tree-tunnel-thingies – so cool!
The trail goes up and down, in and out of the forest. Along the way you’ll pass by multiple lakes, some small, a few pretty impressive in size. There are a few small spur trails if you want to take a walk around some of them.
One of the final lakes before making it to Wildcat camp
One of the best areas of the trail (about 3/4 of the way to Wildcat camp) was the below mossy, ferny forest. It was a really cool grove of older trees and it really reminded us of the Miner’s Ridge Trail section in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. I highly recommend that trail if you’re in the area, and we were happily surprised at all the great trees we got to see on the Alamere Falls trail, they aren’t mentioned enough in the descriptions and reviews we saw.
Our favorite part of the trail. Pictures don’t do this grove justice, check it out in our Youtube video.
Wildcat Camp: Once you surmount the hill that led you through the beautiful grove of trees, you quickly end up on a hill headed down toward Wildcat camp. It’s a really open camp with zero tree cover and just some scrub protecting it from the coastal winds. It has picnic tables, bear boxes, a pit toilet, and it’s just a couple hundred feet from the beach (really quick, easy access). It looks like a fine place to spend a weekend, but I have to admit that Emily and I both prefer more forest and tree cover at camp.
Wildcat camp below!
Easy beach access
After Wildcat you’re on the beach to Alamere Falls for a little under a mile and a half. It’s a beautiful coast line with lots of bluffs and a nice view of the surrounding Point Reyes National Seashore. You can actually see Alamere Falls as a little white dot when you first start walking down the beach – which is really cool.
Alamere Falls in the distance
We had heard that the beach walk would involve lots bees/mosquitoes and it would smell terrible. We didn’t have any problems with bugs, but we did use bug spray. We also saw a few bees, but they were not aggressive and did not amount to the “swarm” that others had described. The note about the beach smelling held pretty true though. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it smelled a lot more like low tide than many other northern California beaches that we have been on. Even so, we still chose to stop on the beach and have lunch.
The Louisville vegan jerky was absolutely phenomenal. We loved this flavor.
After a tiring walk down the beach, we made it to the falls, which was surrounded by people, it’s clearly very popular. It was just as unique as expected and we crossed the stream (ankle deep) that was flowing into the ocean and sat down to enjoy the falls for a few minutes.
Eventually, as we noticed rocks were intermittently falling onto the beach from the bluff behind us, we made our way back, enjoying a Larabar along the way.
We only enjoy certain Larabar flavors, but this one was good.
The fading light was beautiful as we made our way back to the trailhead and we were treated to a beautiful sunset just as we made it out.
