Point Dume Natural Preserve

This guide to Point Dume Natural Preserve in Malibu opens in 1793, when British naval captain George Vancouver charted this headland and named it for a Franciscan priest, Father Francisco Dumetz, a name a mapmaker later misspelled into Point Dume. It traces the bluff's use by the Chumash people as sacred ground, and its grim turn in the 1930s, when a whaling ship anchored offshore for months while crews dragged gray whales ashore to be stripped of blubber. The misspelling on the sign has never been corrected.