Sonoma & Mendocino

North of San Francisco, Highway 1 leaves the wine country behind and starts doing something different. The coast gets wilder. The towns get smaller. The redwoods move closer to the water. By the time you reach Sea Ranch — a hundred miles north of the Golden Gate, on the Sonoma coast — the road is threading through open grassland above the Pacific bluffs, and the buildings you pass look like nothing else built in America in the 1960s: angled shed roofs, unpainted timber, no lawns, no fences, every structure placed so it disappears into the meadow rather than announces itself above it. The architects who built Sea Ranch in 1964 were trying to prove something — that you could put two thousand people on a wild coastline without destroying the reason anyone would want to be there. The buildings are still teaching architects how to think about land.

Mendocino County, further north, has a different character. The Victorian town of Mendocino sits on a headland above the Pacific; Fort Bragg, ten minutes up the coast, is a working fishing town with a harbour that still smells like one. The Noyo River runs through it to the sea. MacKerricher State Park to the north has surf breaks that see a fraction of the crowds at Mavericks or Steamer Lane. The coast here is less visited than Big Sur, less known than Marin, and the hotels that exist are the ones built by people who came for the land specifically — a lumber baron's house on the harbor bluff, a 2,200-acre former logging town bought from a Wall Street Journal ad and turned into a conservation ranch by a banker from Manhattan who is still there at 97. The Sonoma and Mendocino coast rewards people who make the drive. Most people don't.