Alamere Falls is located in the Phillip Burton Wilderness of Point Reyes National Seashore, about 6 miles (10 km) south of Olema and 6.4 miles (10.3 km) northwest of Bolinas, California. The falls occur where Alamere Creek cascades 40 feet (12 m) over a sea cliff, 0.4 miles (0.6 km) north of Double Point, directly into the ocean at high tide and onto Wildcat Beach at other times. Upstream, the upper Alamere Falls consists of three cascades fed by Alamere Creek, collectively dropping 20–30 feet (6–9 m). The creek originates at about 1,200 feet (365 m) on the south flank of Firtop Hill, flowing southwest for 3 miles (5 km) and draining a watershed of about 1,730 acres (700 ha). Alamere Falls is a rare example of a suspended creek channel, where wave erosion of the seacliff outpaces creek bed erosion. Similar examples include McWay Falls on the Big Sur coast, Hug Point Falls near Arch Cape, Oregon, and Blumenthal Falls at Cape Falcon. The Point Reyes area is divided by the San Andreas Fault, aligning roughly with the Olema Valley. East of the San Andreas Fault, the Coast Ranges primarily consist of rocks in the Franciscan Complex, a belt of highly deformed and variably metamorphosed graywacke, mudstone, volcanics, limestone, and chert. The Franciscan Complex is widely accepted as an accretionary wedge formed above a subduction zone when the western edge of the North American Plate was predominantly a convergent boundary from the Late Jurassic to the Miocene. In contrast, the area west of the San Andreas Fault has a Cretaceous granitic basement similar to that of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This granitic foundation is overlain by a thin layer of early Eocene strata, followed by a thick sequence of Miocene sedimentary rocks. These rocks are exposed at the Alamere Sea Cliffs, forming a geological feature known as the Santa Cruz mudstone. This mudstone has a high silica content due to the deposition of the diatom Nitzchia reinholdii in the late Miocene epoch.

The historical inhabitants of the Point Reyes area at the time of European arrival were the Tamal Coast Miwok, who had lived there for thousands of years. They subsisted as seasonal hunters with a diet that included fish, clams, mussels, and crab, as well as deer, elk, bear, mud hen, geese, and small game, which they hunted with spears and bows. They also gathered various plants for immediate consumption and storage in granaries. The land of the Coast Miwok remained undiscovered by Europeans until 1579 when Captain Francis Drake sighted and mapped the fog-shrouded headlands from the Golden Hind. His ship was laden with gold and treasures, such as porcelain, taken from Spanish galleons traveling between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in New Spain. Drake claimed the land for Queen Elizabeth I, naming it New Albion, before setting sail southwest to complete his circumnavigation of the globe, returning to England in 1580. Point Reyes was first documented on Spanish maps in 1603 when Sebastián Vizcaíno sighted the headlands on the Roman Catholic feast day of the Three Wise Men. He named the point “La Punta de Los Reyes” or “Point of the Kings.” The Coast Miwok inhabited the area until the late 18th century when the Spanish built Mission San Rafael. Franciscan padres traveled to Point Reyes to persuade the Coast Miwok to relocate to the mission, where they were converted and forced into labor. In 1821, following the Mexican War of Independence , Spanish mission lands were divided into private land grants after the Mexican secularization act of 1833. Rancho Las Baulines was an 8,911-acre (3,606-hectare) Mexican land grant awarded in 1846 by Governor Pío Pico to Gregorio Briones. The grant extended from Bolinas Lagoon north to the southern end of Drakes Bay and Wildcat Beach, reaching inland to the Olema Valley.

Point Reyes National Seashore encompasses 71,028 acres (28,744 ha) of parkland established in 1962. It allows historical agricultural uses to continue and is maintained by the US National Park Service as a nature preserve. Nearly half of the seashore is within the Phillip Burton Wilderness, which covers 33,373 acres (13,505 ha) of forested ridges, coastal grasslands, sand dunes, and rugged shoreline. This wilderness area is named after Congressman Phillip Burton, who served in the US House of Representatives from 1964 until his death in 1983. The dramatic rocky shores of the National Seashore result from dynamic marine and terrestrial processes. Steep sea cliffs are formed as river channel incision erodes the landscape vertically while waves erode it horizontally. When the rate of channel incision outpaces cliff formation, the river can cut through to sea level, creating an incised channel. This interaction of forces shapes one of the most diverse landscapes on the California coast. Incision-dominated channels occur when drainage basin areas are large and river discharge is perennial, or when sea cliff retreat is slowed due to low wave energy or resistant geology. When sea cliff formation outpaces channel incision, the cliff is maintained, and channels do not cut through the cliff edge to sea level. These channels end abruptly as suspended or hanging valleys called coastal knickpoints. Such features occur when cliff retreat is rapid due to prolonged wave attack on the cliff’s base combined with low stream discharge. Ephemeral streams that flow to the beach only during rainy periods are common in California. A notable example is Alamere Falls, where the creek often has very low flow because the drainage basin area is small, precipitation is seasonal, and the mudstone sea cliff’s base is easily eroded by ocean waves at each high tide. Read more here and here. Explore more of Alamere Falls and Point Reyes National Seashore here: