Finding The Lost Coast

Does your mind feel as pinched as your feet? Has your children’s college fund shrunk like a cheap sweater? Are you running out of gas in more senses than one?

You need neither a stiff drink nor a psychiatrist. You need a little change.

Cambodia may be too costly, and Tunisia might take too much time. I know a skinny little road right here in Northern California where the view stretches across the horizon into a fourth dimension, where the land’s as enlivening as a Liszt sonata, and the breeze blows the cobwebs right out of your cranium.

Two miles north of Fortuna in the valley of the winding Eel River, California State Route 211 swings southwest off Interstate 101 and runs past dairy farms to Ferndale, the self-proclaimed Victorian Village, and a State Historical Landmark. It’s the prettiest little cow town in Northern California.

This rich agricultural community (population 1,390; 2000 census) was settled in the 1860s by prosperous Swiss-Italian and Portuguese farmers. Danes driven from home during battles with Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein in the 1870s added to the cultural cocktail. (It’s been too long since you thought of Schleswig-Holstein.)

Ferndale could easily become too cute and too quaint; instead, it has stayed stuck—an antic anachronism—in the 19^th century. Smart and sparkling with façades that always seem freshly painted, the ornate houses along Main and Ocean streets (called Butterfat Palaces from the source of the funds that built them) demand a walking tour, camera in hand. Gimcrack and gingerbread Victorians, they stand in a splendid profusion of styles: Italianate, Roman-Renaissance, Carpenter Gothic, Gothic Revival, Queen Anne, Eastlake, and Stick.

Before abandoning the fripperies of Ferndale for the sequestered coast, stop by the Ferndale Museum where you will feel you’ve just walked backwards into childhood. Visit Golden Gait Mercantile, where you can pick up essentials you’ve forgotten you need: a cast-iron griddle, for instance, some moustache wax, a straw boater, or horehound. You might even shed an appreciative tear in front of what was, until January 7, 2009, the Hobart Gallery; it was the property, until his death in 2007, of the impish Hobart Brown who years ago fathered the local madness known as the Kinetic Grand Championship (formerly known as the Kinectic Sculpture Race), which travels from Arcata to Ferndale; its staged annually on Memorial Day weekend.

Most frequently, drivers who’ve detoured as far as Ferndale grow sensible again, return to 101, and sweep north toward relatively equable Eureka. Too bad.

Those who fill their gas tanks, pick up picnic supplies at Valley Grocery (with perhaps Dramamine to ward off the dizzies), and then head southwest on mean, meandering Mattole Road, are in for a rugged, remarkable ride. They will find the Lost Coast.

Isolated from early ground explorers by a tangled mass of mountains that runs inland from the ocean for 150 miles, its shores protected by a fearsome wall of fog, wicked winds, and knife-sharp rock cliffs and sea-stacks, this coast slept undiscovered for more than 250 years, while Spanish ships sailed north from Mexico, and Asian vessels followed the trades that blew them across the Pacific. (For more than two centuries, even vast San Francisco Bay remained unseen and was finally spotted from overland by Sergeant José de Ortega on November 1, 1769.)

Locals call Mattole Road the wildcat as it twists and wiggles, sliding seaward through a wide spot on the map called Capetown, the skimpy remains of a former stagecoach stop. Just beyond, you may want to step from the car to pay respects to Cape Mendocino, the most westerly point of the continental United States, where a 326-foot sea-stack named Sugar Loaf pokes up from the foam. Right here once stood the coast’s oldest lighthouse (1868), the renovated remains of which now rise at Pt. Delgada, thirty-five miles south (as the spray flies) at Shelter Cove. (The cape honors Don Antonio de Mendoza, a 16^th-century viceroy of New Spain, who also gave his name to the popular village of Mendocino.)

Further on, you’ll reach the only place that can claim the title of town: Petrolia near the mouth of the Mattole River, where in the 1860s small quantities of oil were spied bubbling to the surface. This became the unlikely source of California’s first oil wells, drilled in 1865 by Leland Stanford’s Mattole Petroleum Company. His Union Well spit out a hundred barrels of oil paced at about one barrel per day. The first shipment to San Francisco was loaded into goatskin bags and packed out by mule train. An often-photographed historical marker now witnesses the memory.

Hikers may hesitate here to trek the 3.5-mile trail to the ruins of Punta Gorda Lighthouse, where badly-behaved state workers once worked as punishment.

Slightly beyond, the road stumbles into Honeydew on the north edge of King Range Conservation Area, 60,000 acres of fern-shrouded streams, ancient forests, and golden grasses where leprechauns hide out behind a wall of 4,000-foot mountains.

Honeydew is a handful of Victorian houses washed by some of the heaviest winter rains in America, an average 110 inches per year. Seen the tiny general store, post office and gas pump, and bought a beer and a hot dog? You’ve done it all.

Out of Honeydew, continue on 211, winding slightly north and mainly east on Mattole Road. (Another branch of 211, Wilder Ridge Road, slides off south toward Shelter Cove. You may leave that for another day.) Following 211 will lead you into Humboldt Redwoods State Park and Rockefeller Forest, the largest old-growth coastal redwood forest in the world. Just north of Weott, swivel around 101 (the Redwood Highway) to pick up 254, the Avenue of the Giants.

The Giants they are, having stood through fog of summer and rain of winter (with trillium and sorrel and ferns at their feet) since the bubonic plagues ravaged Europe. Winds have whispered in their crowns since Charlemagne and the Vikings and the birth of Cairo. One drives slowly here, in the presence of important ghosts. As you turn onto the Avenue from 211, note the sign indicating Founders’ Grove Nature Trail, stop in its parking lot, and follow the gentle, short, level walk that begins at the foot of magnificent Founders’ Tree. Once thought to be the world’s tallest tree at 346 feet tall, it was surpassed when the Dyerville Giant was measured at 370 feet. The body of that giant stretches not far away, toppled by a fierce storm in March of 1991. Park at Bull Creek Flat and amble toward its massive remains, slowly eroding into the forest floor, revealing a tangled, upended root system several times the height of a man.

Ease along the Avenue (254), making detours for other wonders, until the shadowed road joins 101 again just north of Garberville and the exit to the Benbow Inn, where you may share a toast to the magnificent wilderness still alive in California.

Georgia I. Hesse was the founding travel editor of the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, a job she enjoyed for many years. She is now freelancing.