Malibu's beaches and canyons

A highway with beaches on one side and mountains on the other

Malibu is not a town in the usual sense. It is a long ribbon of coastline strung along Pacific Coast Highway, with public beaches on the ocean side and canyon roads climbing into the Santa Monica Mountains behind it. There is no center. Whatever you came for, you reach it by driving the highway and turning off at the right sign.

On the sand, three names cover most of it. Point Dume is the headland, with a bluff trail on top that looks down the coast and a cove below it. Zuma is the long open stretch, the widest beach on this piece of coast and the one with the most parking. Malibu Lagoon sits where Malibu Creek meets the ocean beside the pier, which makes it the birding and shallow-water stop rather than the swimming one.

Above the highway, Malibu Creek State Park and Solstice Canyon are the two trail systems most visitors use, and they are not alike. Solstice Canyon is the short shaded walk along a creek. Malibu Creek is the bigger, drier, more exposed network inland, and standing in it you would not guess the ocean was three miles away.

The highway is the whole problem

Pacific Coast Highway narrows to two lanes through much of Malibu and there is no alternative route. When it backs up on a summer weekend, or after an incident, there is nowhere to go around it. That single fact should drive your timing more than the weather does.

Weekday mornings are the calm version. Get on the highway early and the beach lots are open and the canyon trailheads are half empty. By late morning on a Saturday the lots at Zuma and Point Dume are full and people are parking along the shoulder, which is permitted in some stretches and not in others. Read the sign rather than the cars ahead of you.

Beach access is the thing visitors get wrong most often. Long runs of the shoreline are fronted by private houses, but the beach below the high tide line is public and there are marked public accessways between the homes. They are easy to miss at highway speed, so look them up before you set out rather than circling.

Two seasonal notes. The marine layer sits on this coast most mornings in late spring and early summer, and the sun you planned around may not appear until afternoon. And canyon trails close after fire and after heavy rain, sometimes for a long time. Your local manager will know what is actually open the week you are here.