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April 3, 2009
Cozy Cabin Alert! Cabin #9, Organic Farm Cabins
While there's endless great camping in California's Redwood country, the cozy cabin options are surprisingly limited for an area so rife with outdoor opportunities. There are a lots of motor lodge style, post-WW2 hotels along the avenue of the giants, and the usual Victorian, old-bitty B&B type joints in 19th century timber boom towns such as Ferndale, Eureka, Arcata, but where are the nice, rustic cabins? The Redwood Country along California's far northern coast is one of my favorite areas, so I've spent a lot of time searching high and low for the jolly cabins and hotels and will begin reviewing my favorites in this blog, starting with, cabin #9 at the Organic Farm Cabins in scenic but slightly seedy Honeydew ...
Honeydew is situated at the north end of California's gorgeous the Lost Coast. The appeal of this area is unbelievably spectacular hiking and it's quiet back-country feel, but don't expect much boutique charm from the towns. It's called "lost" for a reason: ain't nobody here. This is back-woodsy, timber and marijuana country with that always fascinating tension that is so common in the north coast towns between the conservative, unemployed timber workers whose families have lived around here forever and scraggly, back-to-the-lander types who fled SF and LA in the 70's and 80's. You won't find any espresso shops with quaint names like "mountain grounds" or former farm houses converted into country cuisine meccas by friendly, young, entrepreneurial ex-san francisco culinary visionaries - someday hopefully, but not yet. No, the scene here is decidedly more Deliverance - there are the rednecky, white, rural equivalent of 40-and-a-blunt types hanging out at the Honeydew general store drinking beer out of brown paper bags and rotting houses houses around every corner. Maybe I'm painting too bleak of a picture here, after all the last time I came here was in the dead of winter and it rained non-stop which tends to taint your perception, but I want to make it clear that this is well off the beaten path. Don't let me scare you away though - if you're looking for a quiet getaway and you like hiking, oh, where do I begin - the hiking is some of the most spectacular coastal hiking anywhere, but first let's talk about the cabins.
The lodging options in the Lost Coast area are extremely limited, and while the Organic Farm Cabins have a nice ring to them, I can't recommend any cabin but cabin #9. The owners here are two local, young parents trying to make a go of it - god bless them, they're working with some difficult circumstances since most of these former hotel cabins were occupied by full time residents when they bought the place, and the cabins themselves had been neglected for years. When I was last here, they had converted a few of the older cabins to rentals, but cabin #9 is the only one I was enthusiastic about - and it is totally sweet in that rustic, wood stove, backwoodsy, no tv kind of way.
Now let's turn our attention to the hiking. The Rockefeller Forest, about 20 miles from honeydew over a steep, winding mountain pass, is not only the largest old growth redwood forest in the world, it's also one of the only examples of low elevation, flood plain redwood habitat where the very biggest trees grow. When the timber barons of the 19th century started clearing large swaths of northern California to build San Francisco (and rebuild it over and over as the city got into the habit of burning to the ground every 10 years or so in it's early days), the easiest targets were the trees that grew near rivers. They could just cut them, and float them downstream to the ocean - a plan that would have thrilled the Onceler of Lorax fame: how simple, how profitable! Much easier than climbing up steep hillsides and dragging trees down to the river. It turns out that these flood plains that were cleared first are the choicest redwood habitat and where the true leviathan trees grew. God only knows how big those trees were. Redwood biologists believe that some of them must have been in the 400 ft range. There are numerous examples of 350 foot + trees in the Rockefeller forest with a few world record contenders in the 370 foot + range. To give you some perspective on the size of these trees, the tallest redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument near San Francisco are around 250 feet. The far north coast of California in Humboldt and Del Norte counties are where the true monsters grow. These are by far the tallest in the world, with Douglas Fir and Eucalyptus coming in a distant second and third with some examples in the 300 foot range.
Now let's talk Lost Coast. First of all, class, we're going to review the West Coast's greatest and largest coastal wildernesses: Big Sur, the Lost Coast and Washington's Olympic Peninsula. While Olympic National Park is the Largest of the three at around a million acres, the west side of the Olympics is pretty badly chopped up and has a patchwork of private and publicly owned lands - aside from the Wilderness Beach which is relatively small, the real wilderness doesn't begin until you're 20 or 30 miles inland. For true coastal wilderness, Big Sur is my top pick - with around 300,000 acres of protected wilderness directly adjacent to the coast and peaks rising into the 5000 foot + range within miles of the ocean, you just can't beat it. For our continent, there's nothing like this anywhere outside of Alaska. But the Lost Coast comes in a close second - there is around 50 miles of roadless beach here. That's right, no coastal highway, no dirt roads, no private land - 50 miles that's bisected by one tiny dirt road, in the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, at about the halfway point. This, along with the wilderness beach on the Olympic Peninsula, is the closest you will get to seeing what our beloved west coast was like before us white types made the scene and started tearing shit up. Huge driftwood, sand dunes, waterfalls - it's a kind of freakishly Blue Lagoonish here sans 16 year old Brooke Shields and whoever her blond, permed-out boyf counterpart was - pristine and remote in a way that's a little hard to believe. Believe it though, because it's real and it's here, and the only thing keeping you from coming here is a 6 hour drive - what are you waiting for?
Posted by Hall in Fun Places to go - camping, cozy cabins etc ...
Comments
The Rockefeller Forest area is pretty interesting, the way so many big redwoods grow on such a relatively flat area.
The Olympic National Park which you mentioned next, is on my list to visit this year or next winter.
Cheers,
MDV
Oregon
Posted by: M. D. Vaden of Oregonm at May 27, 2009 4:58 PM
