Sanctuary: Sea Ranch is Sonoma County’s hidden gem
Northern California’s Sonoma County is indelibly known as a place of sophisticated wines and multimillion-dollar vineyards. And that is what makes the west Sonoma town of Sea Ranch quite an outlier. Its appeal is unrelated to wine, or even tourism.
A visitor to Sea Ranch once described it as “paradise at the end of the earth.” It’s not uncommon for first-time visitors to get all hyperbolic about the physical beauty of the place. The cliffside Pacific coast town occupies a wild stretch of land a two-and-a half-hour drive from the Golden Gate Bridge.
The route there follows a spectacular but hair-raising coastal road that descends nearly to sea level and then climbs to skirt its way along cliffs and narrow ledges 250 feet above the rocky shores below. Much of the route is guardrail-free, so take precautions if anyone traveling with you has a fear of heights.
When you enter Sea Ranch, population 1350, be alert: The community could easily slip past and into your rearview mirror without you realizing you’ve already arrived. First-time visitors have been known to look around and ask: Where is it? It turns out that blending in with the abundant cypress trees and thickets of vegetation are actually a part of the calculated and distinctive appeal of the place.
On my family’s first trip to Sea Ranch, my wife and daughter and I embarked on the recommendation of neighbors who lived nearby our former home in Menlo Park, a couple who years ago fell so deeply in love with the place that they made it an annual trip for them and their growing family.
The one piece of advice they gave was to take our time. So we did. We made the long drive up and the return trip to the San Francisco Bay Area at a leisurely pace. We pulled over many times to take snapshots of the irresistible Pacific vistas, which grew more stunning by the mile. We stopped for lunch at an outdoor café in Bodega Bay, the old fishing town where Alfred Hitchcock shot his 1963 thriller The Birds. As I thumbed through a tourist guide and polished off a cup of decent clam chowder, I noticed that just a few blocks away still sits the house Hitchcock used as the backdrop for his unforgettable schoolhouse scene. I walked over to grab a picture while my wife and daughter shopped.
It was late afternoon when we finally pulled into Sea Ranch. Huge fluffs of the evening coastal fog were starting to roll in, but the sun was still high enough to cast a sharp orange glow through the clouds.
As recommended by our friends we had reserved a room at the Sea Ranch Lodge. It was there that we began to understand what gives this place its special character. Set between several smaller lodges that house the guest rooms, the main Lodge of the Ranch contains a restaurant, a post office and a general store. Turning the key to enter our room our eyes were immediately drawn to the view: a huge panel of picture windows looking over a grassy slope descending to the sea cliff.
The room was ample in size but not fancy. It was paneled in warm planks of cedar and redwood and gave off a warm, inviting vibe. In a corner was a gas-fueled stove that with a flick of a switch lit a pile of artificial logs. It did the job of fending off the chilly breeze that pumps in off the ocean every night.
As we came to discover about all of Sea Ranch, it is a place more suited for calm and rejuvenation rather than fussiness, consumption and luxury. This is certainly not for everyone.
After the long drive on that first day we were all ravenously hungry and in no mood to climb back into the car, so we walked a few yards to the Lodge restaurant and enjoyed dinner there.
The following morning, excited to walk and get our first view of the grounds in daylight, we were up and out early. The Sea Ranch property is vast, extending ten miles along the coast and connected by foot trails crisscrossing the property. The land is almost completely undisturbed. On one trail overgrown with wildflowers we came across an old dry water pump and what’s left of an 1870 horse stable, still standing, but barely so.
The simple routines we developed during our days at Sea Ranch helped us quickly begin the process of unwinding from the pressures of office work and urban living. Each morning we spent a few hours on foot exploring trails, taking photos, or peering off the edge of the many nearby cliffs at the crashing seawater 100 feet below. One day we discovered a route that deposited us on a relatively calm beach. It was a partially protected spot, resembling a kind of rocky amphitheater. We found a dry sandy spot to sit and watch the waves breaking offshore, chilling out for an hour or so, each lost in our own contemplations.
And that is how our days at Sea Ranch unfolded and closed: no organized activities, no expensive wine-tastings to attend, no movies. Know that your teenagers and younger kids may not be ready for this kind of low-stimulus downtime, and also be forewarned that there are plenty of patches where you’ll realize you are off the cellphone grid. Plan ahead. A supply of board games or the presence of other kids may be just enough to ward off the boredom of youngsters not used to slowing it down quite like this.
But for those who are youthful and no longer consider themselves young, plenty of simple pleasures will present themselves. On one particularly clear day my wife and I joined a small group of folks also staying in one of the lodges and plopped ourselves down in a row of Adirondack chairs facing west and commanding a good, wide view of the Pacific. This activity – or inactivity – depending on how you look at it, is a Sea Ranch tradition. We grabbed a pair of binoculars, some drinks and snacks and settled in to watch for whales.
One fellow lodger had excitedly told us that a few days before his group had spotted a whole family of whales migrating north along the coastline, their flukes making them visible from the Ranch. So we watched. And watched. And watched some more. After a few hours gazing at the blue water (OK, I admit I may not have remained awake the entire time), the warm afternoon air turned chilly. We returned to our room not having spotted a whale but perfectly content about an afternoon together in the fresh air and sun.
And this is what Sea Ranch is all about. From the design of the lodges to the miles of hiking trails, towering cliffs and empty beaches, it blends man-made things and wild things with greater success than anyplace I’ve ever visited. As I read more about the place and chatted with other visitors, I learned that the success of Sea Ranch’s formula is a legacy of its history.
The main lodge and guest lodges are masterpieces of understatement. They are built out of redwood and designed in a shed-like style with angular rooftops, a style that succeeds in unobtrusively blending into the dramatic natural backdrop. Their coffee-colored exteriors, handsomely weathered by the salt air and sun, give the lodges a rustic appearance, yet their sleek, low-rise design appears somehow modern at the same time
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The pleasures of Sea Ranch are of a piece with its design. And this is no accident. Sea Ranch was born in the early 1960s as a planned community. In a truly wise decision, several prominent architects were brought in to come up with a design that would minimize the footprint of man-made structures. This would be a place where the splendor of the coast would never be subdued by bulldozers or smothered beneath asphalt lots. These early planners aspired to create a thing of beauty that would not eventually become a victim of its own success, trampled underfoot by tourists or real estate profiteers.
David Thigpen is Director of Undergraduate Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He was previously a journalist on staff at Time Magazine, reporting from New York and Chicago on business, politics and popular culture.
David has also worked as a public policy analyst and is a member of the board of directors at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, and The Daily Californian, the student newspaper of UC Berkeley.
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This story was originally published July 20, 2022 at 9:00 AM.