Basics
Guide
The main objective of our trip was to hike to Secret Amphitheater aka Point Reyes Crater aka Skylight Cave. No one can seem to agree on a name for this, but I will refer to it as Secret Amphitheater.
Secret Amphitheater can be easily reached by a day hike from Limantour Beach. I decided to do this hike as an overnight backpacking trip instead because I’ve never backpacked in Point Reyes before (also I love backpacking and will take any reason to do it more.) Coast Campground is located just a mile from the Secret Amphitheater. It was a perfect base for exploring the nearby coastline.
The Hike to Coast Campground
There are many options for getting to Coast Campground. Starting from the Limantour, or Coast and Laguna trailheads would give you a shorter, mostly flat hike. Sky and Bear Valley are at a higher elevation and would give you a mostly downhill hike on the way to camp, and a mostly uphill hike on the way back. We chose to hike from Sky which has a nice view of the ocean on the way down.
The Hike to Secret Amphitheater
The hardest part about getting to Secret Amphitheater is timing your hike for the tides. The hike is directly on the beach and a few sections of the beach are impassable above certain tide levels. It’s important to note that this does not simply mean go at “low tide” as many days do not have a tide low enough to attempt this hike.
Understanding the Tides
The NPS recommends being at the amphitheater at a -1 ft tide. The lower the tide, the easier the hike will be. The conditions may also be easier or harder depending on the season (summer is better) and weather (rain is bad). Negative tides that are at a reasonable daylight hour (and fall on a weekend, for the weekend warriors) are few and far between, so you may have to plan weeks or months in advance for this hike!
I like to use the NOAA interactive site to check tides. This site also has a downloadable annual tide table (here is a link to the 2025 one) with the time of every day’s high and low tide so you can easily scan for viable dates.
You should start your hike so that you are arriving at the amphitheater at the lowest tide. From Coast Campground, it took us 1:15 hrs to reach the amphitheater at an unhurried pace. The cliffs between Coast Campground and the amphitheater are very scenic, and we spent a lot of time getting sidetracked by tide pools, scenic cliffs, and animal skeletons.
The Terrain
The second hardest part about getting to Secret Ampthitheater is the terrain.
Most of the hike is easy beach walking if you’re doing the hike at a negative tide. However, there is one rock feature which the NPS site refers to as “The Drop/Climb”. This outcropping has an 8-foot drop on one side and you cannot go around it at any tide level. It must be climbed over. The NPS site says “Do not descend here unless you are certain you can make it back up.” My recommendation is that if you can find the hand and footholds to successfully climb down it, you will have no issues getting back up as most people find down climbing to be harder.
NPS.gov has a detailed summary of the whole trail, but the route is straightforward so I wouldn’t stress about memorizing the details.
The Campgrounds
Point Reyes National Seashore has several campground options for backpacking: Coast, Wildcat, Sky, and Glen. Coast and Wildcat are coastal and the most coveted, while Sky and Glen are inland and usually have more availability. For this trip, we stayed at Coast campground (the nps.gov for this campground has lots more info.)
Point Reyes’ campgrounds have a lot to offer in terms of amenities. Every campground has a pit toilet, a spigot with potable water, and trash collection. Each campsite has a picnic table and a locker to protect your food and smellables from critters.
Reservations
Campsites can be reserved online on Recreation.gov. They are available year-round and a portion of the campsites are released daily on a 3-month rolling basis at 7 AM PST. The remaining portion of campsites are released 14 days in advance.
Note: One quirk about the release process is that even though the campsites are released 1 night at a time, it is possible to book 2 consecutive nights. This means if you are trying to book a Saturday spot, it might already be booked up the day before during the Friday release.
Day 1
There was no one else at Sky trailhead when we got there at 8 AM on Saturday morning. Soft sunlight was streaming through the misty air.
The trail starts out in the forest with some rolling ups and downs before the descent down to the coast. The wide gravel fire road narrowed after the junction with the Fire Lane trail. I saw some AllTrails reviews lamenting how overgrown the trail was, but we found it pretty manageable in February (although I would still recommend long pants). The trail follows a ridge line for most of the way, and we alternated between views of the ocean and hills through the trees. The forest was sparse as we descended through the burn scars of the Woodward Fire of 2020. A thin layer of fog sat high enough to shield us from the sun but not block the views.
We got to Coast Camp at 11 AM and set up camp. We were trying to get to Secret Amphitheater at lowest tide which wasn’t until 1 PM, so we sat down for a relaxed lunch before heading out for our day hike.
There is only about 1 mile between Coast Camp and Secret Amphitheater, but we gave ourselves a very generous 1.5 hrs to reach it. We weren’t sure how long the scrambling portion of the hike would take. It ended up taking us 1:15 hrs at an extremely relaxed pace.
I love hiking on the beach at low tide because there is so much to explore. We stopped to examine rocks covered with barnacles, sea anemones, seaweed, and starfish. We found a beached stringray carcass and also stopped to look at a surprisingly intact skeleton another group of hikers had found.
The part of the hike that I was most worried about was the scramble (“The Drop/Climb”.) It’s hard to evaluate in advance how challenging a scramble will be since everyone’s scrambling skill level and comfort with exposure is so different. Approaching from the north (the Coast Camp side of the beach), it is a few easy steps up to the top of the rock outcropping. The beach is lower on the south side and you have to downclimb around 8 feet. This may be hard if you are scared of heights, but it’s not technically challenging thanks to the plentiful handholds and footholds.
After we got over this outcropping, there were some cool caves to check out right on the other side (if you don’t have time for these, you can also check them out on the way back).
Continuing further down the beach, we walked through a large rock arch. Right before reaching the amphitheater, there is a feature called the Keyhole, a narrow arch that is just wide enough for one person to pass through. You can also choose to carefully go around it on the slippery tide pools. I’m pretty sure these features would be sketchy when the tide is higher, but the low tide exposed easy walking on sand.
To get back to Coast Campground, you can just retrace your steps. I recalled seeing a photo online of Secret Amphitheater from above, and I figured that there might be a way to see it from the Coast Trail since it travels along the top of the cliffs rather than on the beach.
After making it back over the climb, we followed a short trail uphill from the beach which connected us to the Coast Trail. We stayed on it until we were as close to the Secret Amphitheater as we could get via the trail. At this point, the trail was very far back from the edge of the cliff. I hadn’t done enough research to be confident about going off-trail here, so we decided to just head back to Coast Camp via the Coast Trail.
We had a few hours of downtime back at our campsite, and then we made our dinners and migrated to the beach nearby to enjoy the sunset. Once the sun dipped below the horizon and darkness fell, the light of bonfires started to pop up along the beach.
We were cold without a bonfire, so we started walking back to camp. We proceeded to be shocked by the very noticeable drop in temperature over that 0.2 mile walk. It must have been a 5+ degree difference (thanks to the temperature-regulating effect of the ocean or something).
The night following was one of the coldest nights of backpacking that I could remember besides snow camping despite using all my usual alpine gear. I was fooled into thinking coastal camping is always mild, but it was February after all.
Day 2
The next morning, we woke up to so much water on the tent that I thought it had rained overnight. It was actually just very heavy dew—another quirk of coastal camping. The towels we left out had also absorbed moisture and stiffened from the cold temperatures.
We packed up camp slowly and then hiked back to the Sky Trailhead via the Sky Trail since the Fire Lane Trail was closed.
Even though this whole trip can be done as a day hike, I loved taking it at a slower pace. Spending a night at Coast Camp meant we got to enjoy a beautiful beach sunset and split up the 4 hrs of driving into 2 days. No wonder this is one of the most highly recommended beginner backpacking trips in the SF Bay Area!
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