A Return to Brewery Gulch

My first trip to Mendocino was in 1976 as a hitch hiker in the back of an old Cadillac. Through the darkness of night, I was being driven across the mountains to the coast by an seriously intoxicated fellow trying to flick his lit Chesterfield into an ever-moving ashtray. Mendocino was the first place he stopped the car enough that I could escape. It was very good roll out my sleeping bag that night on the side of the river in Mendocino’s Brewery Gulch. The place has been sacred to me ever since.

Typical gas stop

Arky, Francesca & staff

The very beginning of apple pressing season

This, my third visit, was special because one of my wife’s favorite cousins happens to have a farm overlooking the ocean in Mendocino and it happens to be the site of the 1900’s Mendocino Brewery and the original Brewery Gulch Inn.  Cousin Arky is a sort of renaissance man—a former emergency physician, writer and inn keeper, a business consultant, sawmill operator, purveyor of reclaimed old-growth redwood, organic meat farmer, and orchard-keeper.  Having built a highly regarded new inn from redwood logs he dredged out of the Big River near Russian Gulch, he then sold the operation after many years and moved from the garage into the old house. He and his wife, Francesca, continue to live in the original Brewery Gulch farmhouse with several feral cats,  a big yellow-eyed dog, and Homer, the ghost of the original owner. Homer's portrait, sitting on a horse rolling a cigarette, graces the paneled dining room wall. For two wonderful nights, I ate the cooking of a gourmet chef—their own beef and chicken--  and sipped wine much better than anything I would know to buy back home. I really didn’t have a choice. I was in Mendocino County, home of the world’s finest zinfandel.

I had picked up the Shore Highway, California Hwy 1, (also known as the Pacific Coast Highway) at its northern beginning near Leggett and was now closely following the high bluffs above the Pacific. At times it was sunny and warm, then around a curve and it was socked in with fog and downright cold.  This was my route south to San Francisco and it has to be one of the great motorcycle roads in the world. The occasional small village along the way beckoned with a shabby-chic chowder house, wine-tasting parlor, or general store pumping regular gas at $5.00 per gallon.