There is no highway to Whale Gulch. The way in is the Usal–Chemise Mountain county road — eight miles of single lane, winding up off the pavement and over the ridge — and when you come out the other side you are in a gulch that runs four miles from the Pacific up to the 2,500-foot shoulder of Chemise Mountain.
That road is the reason for everything else here. This stretch of northern Mendocino County, up against the Humboldt line, is called the Lost Coast because the highway engineers gave up on it: the mountains come down too steeply into the ocean for Highway 1 to hold. What got left behind is one of the emptiest coastlines in California, and a community that has spent fifty years learning to run itself.
The place
- Off the grid
- Around eighty-five homesteads, most of them settled during the back-to-the-land years of the 1960s and 70s. There are no municipal utilities. The one line that comes in from outside is the telephone, and it is buried.
- The school
- Whale Gulch School has run K–12 on solar power since 1983 — by most accounts the only off-grid public school in California.
- Volunteers
- Four volunteer organisations have grown up here since 1973: the fire company, the Coastal Headwaters Association, the Community Watershed Council and the Fire Safe Council. In a place this far from anything, the volunteers are the infrastructure.
- What surrounds it
- Sinkyone Wilderness State Park to the north and west, the Chemise Mountain wilderness to the south. The Lost Coast Trail runs down the coast to Whale Gulch beach. Shelter Cove is the nearest town of any size, up the coast in Humboldt County.
Whale Gulch Volunteer Fire Company
The fire company was formed in 1973, after the Finley Creek fire made it plain that nobody else was coming. It covers roughly sixty-eight square miles — about seventy per cent of it in Mendocino County, the rest over the line in Humboldt — taking in the homesteads, the school campus, and the state park and wilderness that bring visitors through.
It runs on fifteen to twenty volunteers: firefighters, first responders and an EMT, with mutual aid agreements with Whitethorn and Shelter Cove. If you live here and want to help, the fire company is the answer to the question.
The community keeps its own site, with current pages for the fire company and the other organisations: whalegulchcommunity.com
Where it is
In an emergency
Call 911. This page is not monitored and nobody is watching it.
Get in touch
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