Fort Bragg Ain’t No Stinkin’ Mendocino…No Way

What a long and twisty road separates this beautiful place from the rest of the world. Maybe that’s why just 1100 people have chosen to live in the artist’s colony of Mendocino.  That plus the fact that you can’t have double pane windows, skylights or even solar panels.

It’s all in the name of historic preservation, said Richard Strom, who was recently a hotelier and now works for the local tourism agency.

But I’ve been spending my time here in Fort Bragg, the burly, working class much larger town of about 7000 9 miles to the north. Here, timber and fishing once ruled the economy, now those two industries are in tatters and service work has taken up much of the slack. Still, I learned that the two towns are so much different there’s not much harmony between them.

What better way to get a sense of what a place looks and smells like than from a seakayak? I joined Cate from Liquid Fusion Kayak for a meander down the river to the sea.

She pointed out the Osprey nests and where the river otters make their nests, and as we slipped along past battered fishing boats, she said that tourism has taken over as industry number one.

Which means that things like the boat junkyard beside this river will have to be cleaned up, along with the leftover machines that once helped float logs down the river and sawed them up right here.  Georgia Pacific owns 400 acres with a long shorefront, Richard told me, which some day will be developed after a myriad of regulators get finished figuring it all out.