Experience the best of Mendocino

Mendocino sits on a grassy headland of the northern California coast, where the land ends in cliffs, sea stacks and sea caves. Lumbermen from New England founded the town in the 1850s, and it keeps their look in white wooden houses with gables and picket fences, water towers and church steeples. Mendocino Headlands State Park wraps the village on three sides with trails above tide pools and pounding surf.

The Big River estuary can be paddled by canoe, and the redwood groves and fern-lined canyons of Russian Gulch and Van Damme state parks lie close by, with a pygmy forest of stunted trees on the high ground. Fort Bragg, to the north, has Glass Beach, a shore of sea-polished glass pebbles, and botanical gardens running to the cliffs. Grey whales pass offshore between winter and spring.

Seafood, wild mushrooms and local cheeses fill the menus, and cider and wine from the Anderson Valley, over the ridge, reach the cafés. Fog often wraps the coast in summer, and the clear autumn days are the prized ones.