North To Oregon

There are moments in life that take one completely by surprise. I have no doubt anyone reading these words could list a tiresomely lengthy number of such moments and only recently. But hands up anyone who shared their toilet this weekend with a woman dressed as a 19th century chambermaid? I did.

It is a great thing to travel with your own toilet and I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve used it on city streets, in parking lots and sometimes even far from the madding crowd, on a deserted beach or lost in a wild wood. As you can see above, it is small and confined and self contained which means I have to unhook the gray five gallon bottom half to pour away the contents in some suitable place, preferably a trail head pit toilet or RV sewer dump. It’s a job I don’t mind oddly enough but for most people it is a subject of hushed dread. 

My wife photographed these cheerful seaside Mennonites from Ohio gathering beach mementoes of their visit to the lost coast. One of them came to us with a “strange request” which I figured might be a walk through of our unusual home, actually a common enough request. But no.  She immediately gained my instant respect for her bravery and utter fearlessness when she asked if she could use our loo. I fell over myself to accommodate her  and spare her further blushes. 

How she sorted herself out in our tiny space I don’t know but I closed the sliding door assuring her she was invisible inside and stood guard outside with my back to her out of her sight. Our outside windows allow no light in and she also had the wooden door to assure her privacy. 

I find myself at a loss to understand the range of eccentricities this country encompasses but I have met Mennonite farmers and missionaries all over the place in the Midwest and Belize most notably and my mind boggles thinking of them dressed for a Polish winter in a Belizean summer while doing hard manual labor. I was pleased to be able to help out a very poised and cheerful member of this oddball community in distress. It felt like one oddball helping another and I greatly enjoyed the convergence of our two very different but equally marginal lifestyles in a country packed with suburban conformity. 

I think we caused some confusion when we took a dip. Swimming is not a thing they would do in public certainly but like I said the US accommodates a range of eccentricities and Layne and I wanted to see what the water temperature was at this far north latitude, after the Mennonites wandered off looking for sea shells.  

The seawater was clam and flat yet cold to a degree hard to imagine and after a minute of desperate paddling up to our necks we were back on land absorbing all the sun’s rays we could. I have to admit the endorphins released by this encounter with the water were quite pleasant but not enough to make me want to do that again.  

After our second night parked alongside Mattole Road we made a u-turn and drove north up the hill toward Ferndale 25 miles and 90 minutes away. The road was pretty awful, not as bad as the southern approach through Petrolia but it was a rough unpredictable ride mixing newly paved bits and ghastly potholes in rapid succession.

It was a 15 to 20 mile per hour road with sudden braking for the bad bits and lots of pulling over for locals with no regard for their vehicles’ long term integrity.  The views were excellent. 

Ferndale, the terminus of this wild hour long drive is a pretty town, a place I’d like to visit after Covid if we find ourselves bowling along Highway 101 again. I seem to come to this region once every 35 years on average so I expect I shall run out of time before my next s hiked visit to Jefferson Country. There is a vocal but small group of libertarians who want to create a separate state in Northern California and southern Oregon dedicated to supposed Jeffersonian principles of small government. No action so far on their part but they do have good weed which may be slowing them down. 

We re-joined the main coastal road and they’ve named US 101 the “Redwood Highway” around here  so we knew what to expect.

Actually we did not expect salmon jerky of which we bought a sample and it was quite excellent, like smoked salmon but not slippery like lox. Recommended. 

We found the redwoods, though I have to say we lived among them for twenty years in Santa Cruz, and still they are awe inspiring. There is a short diversion called the Drury Parkway off Highway 101 and we took the turn with our loot from a brief stop at the Eureka Costco and had roast chicken sandwiches for lunch.  

If you’ve never seen the redwoods, so called owing to their bark, you owe it to yourself. They have two enemies: fire and wind. Otherwise they live forever and some of these trees were around when Methuselah stalked the Middle East. They make excellent lumber and early US businesspeople tore through old growth stands to build equally indestructible homes with their wood. That practice has been banned but old growth trees are rare.

Redwoods (Palo Colorado in Spanish, and those early explorers were equally intoxicated by these trees) grow on this coast as they water themselves from the moisture of the marine inversion clouds that come overhead. Far overhead. They are astonishing, such huge trees living off mist drizzle.  

To give you some perspective: 

It was cold so I walked Rusty for a short while and I photographed the memorial commemorating brothers killed in World War Two. I assume the two names were brothers…All I could find out was that the grove was established in 1965 by their uncle a judge originally from Kentucky.  

I can’t imagine how their mother coped but that was a different time and stoicism was the order of the day. 

It was a somber moment standing submerged at the bottom of the long shadows cast by these vast trunks.

We rejoined Highway 101 and turned north. Crescent City, the last major town in California and county seat of Del Norte County was a long line of box stores lining a four lane highway. 

Billboards promising the best of Oregon weed distracted my elderly brain from the moment we were about to pass the Stateline but I half caught the store itself stuffed with modern legal cannabis on the California side of the creek that separates the two states.

The first pleasant change was the vast rest area we found just north of Brookings. Oregon offered us a free dump site and free water to fill our tank. And a vast spacious rest area to walk our dog. Nice. 

In Oregon US Highway 101 becomes the coastal scenic highway where California runs its own state Highway One up the coast. 

Aside from the fresh scenic views along the coast we also reverted to having our gas pumped for us just like in Mexico. We thought we did well finding regular for $5:05 in Oregon but it was even less expensive the closer we got to Washington State. And we saved a lot by paying cash. Weird. 

A little afternoon sun, a break in the heavy clouds cover cheered us up a little as we drive north. 

63 degrees and heavily overcast was not our idea of a pleasant August day. We turned the heat on in the cabin and were glad of it. I had been re-reading about Webb Chiles sailing Cape Horn freezing cold and wet and the thought of it chilled me. 

“No Overnight Parking ” is the mantra of course. Nothing daunted my navigator found an isolated open parking space three miles up in the hills among the trees far from the hectic coastal traffic. 

It was silent and perfect and free. We had beans and steak and tortillas and cider and slept the sleep of the just. Our first afternoon out of California at last. 

The blue dot marks the spot. 

The Lost Coast

There is a stretch of coast in the far northern tip of California that offers a wilderness experience you will be hard pressed to find in the United States. There are no nattily built footpaths, no hand rails and no warning signs here. You are on your own and it is magnificent.

The thing is you have to get there and it ain’t easy. Why would it be?

“Jeez, this road is terrible,” my wife the navigator said as we bounced and jostled slowly toward Petrolia still more than 20 miles and one Google-map-hour away. The pavement looked like  someone had poured molten lava down a hill and let it set as it chose. We had ripples and bumps and dips and torn up stretches and pot holes to contend with, and the road itself was narrow and twisted and coiled upon itself like a snake with a broken back. The unpaved bits came toward the end near Honeydew and Petrolia where slides had torn up the asphalt which hadn’t been replaced.  There are no celebrities or tech billionaires with second homes here to demand roads get paved. The scenery was glorious and traffic was very sparse, so it’s their loss I guess.

It was a Saturday so we spotted what looked like ordinary weekenders in shiny impatient SUVs and giant chromed pickups bought to tackle these wild country roads that we were wallowing gently down in our unsuitable 21 foot Promaster. The dusty pick ups held back but leapt past as soon as I pulled over to let them by, while the city slickers tail gated as I looked for a suitable place to pull over. Not your average commute:

Most of the countryside was devoid of human construction. We saw lots of gates and quite a few mailboxes but you can see why in the bad old days they grew dope out here illegally like moonshine in Appalachia. 

And one gets the impression from the number of grow houses under translucent plastic tarps barely visible from the road, and the miles of impenetrable fencing, that even now that marijuana is completely billboard advertising legal it is still a Humboldt County industry.

Our destination was a stretch of coast between Punta Gorda and Cape Mendocino advertised on iOverlander as having several attractive pull outs with beach access and total isolation.  The warnings were explicit: approach from the north, via Ferndale as the road is better and shorter. Come from the south via Petrolia at your peril as the road is winding narrow and difficult. “The worst road I have driven,” was a frequent comment.  Naturally we came from the south as we wanted to explore, especially as a poet I used to know in Santa Cruz made his home near Petrolia for many years and I had never seen the area. I was in awe of Stephen Kessler’s intellect and I wanted to see what he found so compelling.  I’m still not sure frankly as Petrolia isn’t just isolated, it really is lost and he has long since moved. 

Layne surprised me by suggesting we stop for some eggs at a random isolated farm, which around here are sold on the honor system, seven bucks for a dozen. I don’t suppose many passers by would purchase if the eggs weren’t chilled in a fridge, but in Mexico we bought ours from stalls never refrigerated and they were excellent stored at room temperature.   

It was a slightly odd touch-free transaction and we dropped our ten dollar bill, took the change and the eggs and drove away. It wasn’t quite 80 degrees but the air was warm and still, deep in the mountains. We saw the chickens in their run on the hill guarded by a rather lonely dog in a kennel as abandoned to his own devices as we were. 

Wouldn’t it be funny if we came across a gate saying “No Public Access?” Layne said cheerfully as we resumed twisting and bouncing on Mattole Road toward the elusive and ever distant Petrolia. We laughed at the suggestion and then we promptly found this:

We stared at the tree for a few seconds, possibly expecting the holographic joke to de-materialize but after we had sucked in our breath and expelled a few choice swear words it was obvious we had to do something to avoid backtracking two hours and forty miles to Highway 101. So we got on with it, and I don’t mean I got my hand saw out and worked myself into a lather to cut a path through the downed tree. No sir, I got smart. I put out a red triangle we carry to warn oncoming cars in case of breakdown and then equipped Layne with our red breakdown flag (required in Latin America) and I backed Gannet2 across the road to get the best angle of purchase with our 12,000 pound WARN winch. I unspooled the rope by hand…

…all under Rusty’s eagle eye. He is the best supervisor in a crisis, sitting to one side to make sure all goes well.

I figured a rough angle from the end of the tree to the front of the van which would pull it aside enough to open one lane and with the winch line shackled in place I turned the engine on to help power the winch and then used the remote control in my hand to wind the rope back into the winch easily pulling the tree. 

It went surprisingly well and with the tree out of the way I used the remote to rewind the winch and feed the rope smoothly back onto the drum.  That’s the second time the $3000 winch (cost fully installed from Van Compass) has saved us - once when we fell into some soft sand in Barra de Potosí and now on the road to Petrolia. Oddly enough no traffic showed up until just after I had finished opening the road. The first driver on the scene said he happened not to be carrying his chainsaw which he usually does when he visits his place up here. I said no way was I going to go all lumberjack and saw it by hand!

The second car that showed up was a local fire department dispatcher so we had a laugh about that coincidence. She was really happy to see the road re-opened and very grateful. Of course my winch work  wasn’t mere altruism as I was as keen as anyone to get to the coast…and indeed I saw some scuffed bark and broken branches on the tree leading me to wonder if someone in a big lifted truck didn’t just drive through the obstacle. Not me in my pansy van. The whole operation including packing up took about half an hour.

Feeling pretty pleased with ourselves we resumed our drive to the ever distant Petrolia and that was when we found the steepest section of road which was, very cleverly, not paved. This would be tricky to negotiate in a rainstorm in winter. On a warm summer’s afternoon it was dusty and slow but delightful. 

Petrolia itself looked pretty much like Google street view shows it, literally a one street town with a fire department next to the general store which supposedly sells gas but didn’t advertise anything more combustible for sale than propane. 

I might have liked a masked wander in the store but Layne wasn’t in a shopping mood so we pressed on. I wonder if they sell zebra meat?

I didn’t get a photo of a mountain lion we scared into motion as we drove by but that was the first time I’ve seen one, and it was bounding through the dry grass, camouflaged such that at first I thought it was just another deer. It was sleek and powerful and looked much bigger than I had imagined, more like a “real” lion than the oversized cat of my imaginings. 

We let the crappy road, the dirt diversions, the pot holes, downed trees and the brutal ripples in the asphalt fade behind us when we finally got within sight of the water, and it was an astonishingly calm, flat day speckled with unexpected sunshine.

The rock on the horizon marks Cape Mendocino itself, though we parked a little before we reached that exact point. 

The odd thing about this entire northern California journey thus far is the total absence of public lands. There are no national forests along our route, no Bureau of Land Management signs, no dispersed camping, just fences, pot farms and no trespassing  signs. Even along the beach we saw cattle grazing both sides of the road and we had to drive some distance to find pull outs with open beach access, as promised on iOverlander.

Bear in mind we were here on an August weekend and if not crowds I did expect to see a few other people.  Cars flashed by coming from Ferndale to the north on the easier access road (I hope!) and from Petrolia to the south. We saw a few tourists stop and walk briefly on the beach but for the most part we could have carried out nude Druidic rituals by the side of the  road and offended no one. It is that isolated. 

This spot has a reputation for high winds and cool temperatures but we struck a weekend with almost no wind and totally flat seas. There was some marine inversion of course but as hard as I looked I could see no spectacular wave action crashing on the multitude of rocks. It was a great time to motor your boat north to Seattle in a flat calm.

We weren’t completely alone though, and Rusty was not at all happy to see cows overhead. He sat and watched them closely as they grazed the hillside.

The beach is composed of tiny gray pebbles rounded by sea action and soft to walk on. So soft it is actually a bit of a chore, at least for me, not my dog. 

He loved this spot and kept coming up and licking my face and hands, his way of expressing approval when we stop somewhere worth while. It really isn’t a bad stop for us either and Layne expressed her approval too, though perhaps less effusively. 

All to ourselves. No internet service, no sounds except the birds and the waves and occasionally the cows or a car flashing by. Layne thought the road to Petrolia was the toughest we’ve ever driven bar none, not even in Mexico, but we both agreed the drive was worth it and recommend it to you for some well earned solitude.

A half moon on the water:

Tide lines:







Highs in the 70s and lows overnight in the 50s. Perfect insect-free camping climate. 

Mystery tracks that appeared on the beach overnight, raccoon, coyote or…lion?

After two days we left it as we found it…and went north in search of a cell signal!