REDWOODS

When you walk for long enough, you sometimes need to stop somewhere. Not to end the walk, but to stay a while with what it has opened up. In California, that place was Salmon Creek Farm.

Hidden deep in the redwoods of Northern California, the farm is part retreat, part commune, part creative experiment, brought back to life by artist and architect Fritz Haeg. Small cabins are scattered through the forest, linked by narrow trails, and there is almost no signal.

We stayed in Cabin 7, Cedar, the most remote on the property, in a clearing above a ravine. In the rainy season, you fall asleep to water running down a series of small waterfalls. Inside: a bed, some wood, everything you need and nothing more.

North of San Francisco, Highway 1 grows quieter and the coast a little wilder. Small towns, redwood forests, and roads winding between the ocean and the trees.

Spend a few days here and you understand that this corner of California has always drawn people who wanted to live a little differently.

Its history runs deep. For thousands of years, this was the land of Indigenous peoples, among them the Pomo, whose lives followed the forest and the seasons. Then came colonisation, displacement and logging.

The redwoods, among the most extraordinary living things on Earth, became timber: around 95 percent of California’s original old-growth forest was cut down. Mendocino grew up around its sawmills.

Decades later, the story turned. San Francisco was becoming a city where people imagined other ways to live. Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the Six Gallery, with Jack Kerouac in the room. By the 1960s, music, protest and communal life were questioning how we work, what we buy, and what a good life looks like.

Some wanted to go further than imagining. So they went north, to Mendocino, where there was more space and room to try. Artists, writers, architects, craftspeople. The Mendocino Art Center, opened in 1959, drew people who came not to get away, but to live and create differently.

Over time, living differently also meant protecting the place itself. Local groups fought to save the coast and the remaining redwoods.

By the mid-1970s, that care had reached the ocean. After Greenpeace confronted Soviet whalers off Cape Mendocino in 1975, local artists and residents formed the Mendocino Whale War Association. Their campaign joined the movement that led to the global moratorium on commercial whaling, agreed in 1982. The Mendocino Whale Festival they started in 1976 still takes place every year.

Salmon Creek Farm was born in 1971, in the middle of that movement. A small group settled in the forest at Albion, building cabins, growing food and learning to live together.

They built their way uphill, using what they could find, reuse or make with their own hands. Many cabins still carry the names of the people who first lived in them. Half a century on, they are still standing: repaired, adapted, never erased. The forest has grown back around them too. The land had been clear-cut in the 1950s, and the young trees the first residents knew are now the redwoods that surround the farm.

Each generation has changed the place without starting over. These days, that feels quietly radical.

The people you meet

What surprised us most was the people. Around Mendocino, we met a luthier, ceramicists, craftspeople of every kind, making things slowly and by hand, with little interest in trends. One ceramic artist makes musical instruments out of clay: strange, beautiful objects, somewhere between sculpture and sound.

Here, it still feels natural to spend years learning a craft, simply because the work is worth doing. And beneath it all, you sense older layers: the land never feels empty.

At Salmon Creek Farm, disconnecting happens on its own. With barely any signal, the rhythm changes without you noticing. You pay more attention to the light, the weather, the people around you. Conversations last longer.

That extra space was what we loved most. Nothing is forced. There is simply more room for everything that usually gets pushed aside.

We were happy, of course, to come back to hot showers and reliable Wi-Fi. But we came home with a question: what if progress is not always about adding more, but about knowing what we can do without?

At the farm, work is shared, knowledge is shared, and people rely on each other a little more. Solidarity stops being an idea and becomes a daily habit, because life simply works better that way.

A cabin in the woods is not the answer to everything. But it reminded us how little we need to feel good, think clearly and enjoy being together.

The cabins have stood for more than fifty years. The garden is tended season after season, and trees are planted by people who may never sit in their shade. Repair, maintain, pass on, add a layer.

This is where Salmon Creek meets what we are building with Forrest. A trail takes the time it takes. A garden takes years, a forest decades, a meaningful place generations. Walking more, relying on each other, owning fewer things but choosing them well, keeping them for life and repairing them when they break: it is not an idea from the past. It may well be the idea of tomorrow.

So if you find yourself on the West Coast, don’t stop at Los Angeles and San Francisco. Keep going north along the Pacific. Drive into the redwoods, walk around Mendocino, and if you can, find your way to Salmon Creek Farm.