Mugu Rock

The road you drive here was cut through solid volcanic rock, and the rock that remains is the leftover.

Point Mugu is a promontory in Point Mugu State Park on the Ventura County coast, near Port Hueneme and Oxnard. The name comes from Muwu, the Ventureño Chumash word for beach, and Cabrillo wrote it down in his journals in 1542.

Muwu was not a minor place. It was a Chumash village at Point Mugu in pre-colonial times with the highest population of any coastal Chumash settlement along the Santa Monica Mountains, a ceremonial centre, and the ancient capital of Lulapin, a major political unit of Chumash territory running from what is now Los Angeles County north to Santa Barbara. That territory stretched 60 miles along the coast and at least half as far inland. Mission records show 191 people baptised out of Muwu, more than from any other Chumash village near the Santa Monica Mountains. The last chief of Muwu, Mariano Wataitset, son of Halashu, was baptised at Mission San Buenaventura in 1802.

The reason the shape of the headland looks unfinished is engineering. When highway engineers began plotting the Pacific Coast Highway route through here in 1919, Point Mugu was a near-vertical ridge of resistant volcanic rock, an igneous dike that had intruded the softer sediments of the Topanga formation in a distant epoch. They blasted through it. Mugu Rock is what was left standing beside the cut, and it has been photographed for car advertisements ever since.

Mugu Lagoon, a salt marsh just up the coast, sits inside Naval Base Ventura County, formerly Naval Air Station Point Mugu.

One sombre note belongs here. On 31 January 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashed off Point Mugu and all 88 people aboard were killed.