Wilderfolk
Guests & Instructors
Wise and talented people teach here, bringing their students out to share the old ways of finding and cooking what this coast gives up. Remarkable creators come and camp with us too, and they film beautiful things while they’re here.
Camp Catch n Cook, 6 to 8 November 2026
Still open until October 15. Join now!
Filmed here
Camp Catch & Cook: Three Days with Outdoor Chef Life!Catch N Cook California
Surf Fishing Lingcod + Guided Catch & Cook Overnights?!Catch N Cook California
Low Tide Cioppino Catch and CookOutdoor Chef Life
Hosting a Camp Catch & Cook w/ Outdoor Chef Life!!Catch N Cook California
Eating ONLY What I Catch For 24 HoursNick Kratka
Taku Kondo
Taku is a former sushi chef who catches or forages nearly everything he cooks, then turns it into gorgeous restaurant-quality food over a fire on a beach. His cookbook, Coastal Harvest, is a bestseller, and he travels the world fishing and cooking his way through it. He's cooked at our fire.
Watch Outdoor Chef Life
Kevin Smith
Kevin is a California native and a doctor of archaeology, with a lifetime of foraging behind him and deep research into how California's Indigenous hunter-gatherers lived and ate. He teaches mushroom identification, coastal foraging, freedive spearfishing, shore fishing and crab snaring, always in small groups and always leaving the place as he found it. He's camped here, filmed here, and taught here.
Watch Catch N Cook CaliforniaNick Kratka
Nick teaches people how to harvest food sustainably and how to get themselves into the fisheries that make it possible, and as he puts it himself, this is his life. He brings an enormous audience along with him wherever he goes. He's filmed at camp.
Watch Nick KratkaInstructors
Local folks who know this coast teach here through the season, and nobody expects you to show up knowing anything.
Chris Watkins
Mendo Family Forage
Chris runs Mendo Family Forage with his family, hunting wild mushrooms along this coast and turning them into salts and powders that end up in kitchens and shops around the county. He's a lifelong outdoor adventurer who came out from the Bay Area for the quiet and the big trees, and he guides forays for wild edibles and for medicinal mushrooms and plants. He teaches here.
See his classes
Shay Peterson
Chrome Coast Steelhead
Shay has lived and fished on the Mendocino coast since 1996, and years of showing up, helping out and keeping his word have opened up quiet private water on the coast rivers that hardly anybody else gets to fish. He runs Chrome Coast Steelhead and teaches as he goes: where steelhead hold, how to cast to them, and how to handle a wild fish so it goes back into the river strong. He's happiest out on the coldest, wettest mornings of the season, on the hunt.
Come and learn something
Classes run year-round through all seasons. There’s always something new to experience.
See the experiences