Wilderfolk programs
Experiences
Great days out around Fort Bragg and along the Mendocino coast, guided by people who know this country. Good for groups, good for families, and nobody expects you to arrive knowing anything.
At camp
These start at the camp gate and you walk. The water’s about five minutes away, and the tide pools at Laguna Point are fifteen minutes up the old Haul Road from there. They’re the easiest way to spend a couple of hours with a guide, and they’re lovely with children, because a tide pool is about as interesting at eight years old as it is at fifty. We schedule them against the tide chart rather than the clock, so the meeting time moves through the week and we’ll agree it with you.
Exploring the Intertidal
$35.00
When the tide drops right out, the rocks up the Haul Road turn into the best classroom on this coast. We'll work the cold pools from the high zone down to the low with hand lenses out, and every creature we turn up gets a name before it goes back exactly where it was. A lovely ninety minutes, and the children always love it.
Intertidal Forage
$65.00
The same beautiful shoreline, except this time you're taking things home. We'll identify what's out there before anything gets cut, then harvest it properly, from the outside and above the holdfast, so it comes back. You'll hear what each one is actually for: which seaweed goes in the miso, which dries into a snack, which shellfish wants a grill under it.
Intertidal Sushi
$95.00
Everything in the Intertidal Forage, and then you eat it. The last half hour happens sitting on the rocks with a rice pot, a stack of nori and hot sake, rolling your own with what you picked up off the bench underneath you. It's a very hard thing to beat.
Half days out
A morning in the redwoods, out at the waterfalls back in the hills, or up the coast in the pygmy forest. You’re generally out about four hours and back at camp with the rest of the day to yourselves. The price shown is for driving yourself, and if you’d rather leave the roads to us we’ll take the whole group in the van for a flat fee that gets cheaper the more of you come.
Forest Bathing in the Redwoods
$85.00
A trained practitioner leads this one, and it's slower than anything else we do: you'll walk maybe a quarter mile in the whole two hours. Attention to what's moving, to what's underfoot, to sound with your eyes closed, then a long quiet stretch sitting alone out of sight of everybody. There's tea afterward, brewed right there, and it's consistently the one people are surprised by.
Waterfall Exploration
$95.00
Chris picks the waterfall, and he won't decide until the week you come, because which one is worth the drive depends entirely on what the rain has been doing. The walk in is the good part: slow going, plants named as you pass them, baskets out if anything's fruiting, and Chris explaining how a logged redwood forest puts itself back together and what the understory tells you about the water underneath it.
The Ecological Staircase
$95.00
Jug Handle stacks five marine terraces from the beach up to the ridge, each about a hundred thousand years older than the one below it, so walking inland walks you through half a million years of soil. You finish in a mature forest you can see over the top of, century-old trees standing at knee height. It's the finest interpretive trail on this coast and almost nobody guides it.
Fern Canyon and the Devil’s Punchbowl
$95.00
The Punchbowl is a collapsed sea cave a hundred feet across that fills and drains with the swell, and on a big day it booms. Then we head inland up a creek bed walled in fern the whole way, cool and green and dripping, to a thirty-six foot falls at the top. Two completely different places in one easy morning.
Mendocino Coast Mushroom Tour
$165.00
This is Chris's own foray, and the reason his produce when other people's don't is that he scouts the ground in the days before you arrive. Where you go depends on what's fruiting and what he's got access to, and he won't decide until close to the date. You'll come back with mushrooms, a permit good for the rest of the season, and the ability to find them again without him.
Full days
Whole days out along the coast and inland, through some of the most beautiful country in northern California: old-growth redwoods, two lighthouses you can climb, the wine valley over the hill, and a river that runs at eighty-five degrees all summer. The van, the driving, your guide and lunch are all in, so there’s nothing to arrange once you’ve booked. These are the ones people come back for.
Pygmy Forest and Picnic
$165.00
Up top there's a level boardwalk through a mature forest you can see clean over: cypress and pine that are decades old and barely past your boots, stunted by hardpan and sour soil. From there the trail runs downhill through the canyon to the coast, where the same trees that quit at ankle height stand three hundred feet tall. Chris meets everyone at the beach with a proper picnic, and anybody who'd rather not walk rides down with him.
Two Lighthouses
$265.00
There are two lighthouses you can walk into between here and the Bay Area, and this day gets you both, with ninety miles of gorgeous coastline in between. Point Arena is the tallest one you're allowed to climb on the West Coast, rebuilt in reinforced concrete after 1906 because the San Andreas runs into the sea five miles up the road. Point Cabrillo is the opposite: small and perfect, its original lens still turning.
The Swimming Hole Run
$275.00
The coast is sixty degrees and foggy in July. Ninety minutes inland the South Fork Eel runs clear and green over gravel at eighty-five, with deep pools, rope-swing trees and hardly anybody in them. Lunch on the gravel bar, cold drinks out of the cooler, and we bring the towels.
Edge of the Continent
$295.00
The San Andreas Fault runs out of California and into the Pacific at Alder Creek, and you can stand right on the trace. Offset drainages, sag ponds, and the whole strange logic of why this coastline does what it does. If the tide cooperates we'll finish at Bowling Ball Beach, where the wave platform is studded with enormous stone spheres, one of the oddest sights in the state.
A Taste of Anderson Valley
$325.00
Old growth in the morning, glasses in the afternoon. Highway 128 runs inland through a redwood tunnel and drops you into one of the coolest-climate wine regions in California, and the Pinot and the Alsatian whites are only possible because of the same marine fog that sits over camp. We'll walk a grove that's never been logged before anybody pours anything.
Montgomery Woods and the Mineral Baths
$345.00
Montgomery Woods held the tallest known tree in the world for a while, and it still holds one of the finest old-growth groves anywhere: a flat bench along the creek where nothing has ever been cut and the quiet is total. Two miles further down the same twisty road are naturally carbonated mineral baths that have run without stopping since 1854. Walk in the morning, soak all afternoon.
Avenue of the Giants
$395.00
Humboldt Redwoods holds the largest expanse of ancient redwood left on the planet, and Rockefeller Forest inside it is the biggest unbroken old-growth stand on earth. You'll walk the length of a fallen giant's root plate, drive thirty-two miles of two-lane road under closed canopy, and stand under the biggest trees you will ever stand under. It's a long day and it's worth the early start.
A Day in the Usal Redwood Forest
$1,250.00
Fifty thousand acres of coast redwood on the Lost Coast, most of it behind a locked gate, guided by the people who manage it year-round. You'll cover ground on a 4×4 ATV that no hiker reaches in a day: ridgelines, old skid roads, and the coastal terrace above the black sand at Usal, with Roosevelt elk and open ocean the whole way along it. A bottle of Anderson Valley wine comes out at the overlook.
Winter Steelhead
$700.00
A winter morning on a cold green river, fishing private water for steelhead fresh in from the sea. Shay teaches you to read the river and cast to where the fish are holding, fly or spin, and brings the rods, the coffee and the lunch. A wonderful day for a first-timer and a real treat for an old hand.
Not sure which one?
Tell us how long you’ve got, who’s coming and what you’re curious about, and we’ll point you at the one that suits. Some of these are better for young children than others, and some are a lot of driving, so it’s worth a quick word first.