Redwoods, Secret Clubs, and a Mountain Full of Lemurians

The region

Above the Golden Gate, Northern California sorts itself into three kinds of country, and the strange stories sort with it. The coast is redwood and fog, cut by the Russian River and reached on two lane roads that were built for logging trucks. Behind the coast the Klamath and Trinity mountains fold up into country where the pavement ends and the roads have numbers instead of names. At the top of the Sacramento Valley a single volcano, Mount Shasta, stands alone above the valley floor and stays in view from Interstate 5 for most of an afternoon.

This guide splits that ground into three zones, each a workable weekend on its own, plus a separate short module on the Yuba County Five for readers coming up from the south. Driving all of it in a single loop is possible, and the planning section below explains how, but the zones are designed to be saved and used one at a time.

The regional mystery tradition

Every story in this region is about something kept out of sight. A private club behind a gate. A colony of houses that hid on purpose. A creature that has never been caught in a forest big enough to hide it. A city inside a mountain. A car left running out of reasons on a snowed-in mountain road. Northern California's forests are large enough to keep a secret, and its history has supplied the people to keep them.

Three things made this the pattern. San Francisco's money and its bohemia have gone north for relief since the Bohemian Club bought its first redwood camp in the 1870s, and Alan Watts followed the same road out of the city a century later. The timber roads that opened the Klamath after the Second World War are what put people at Bluff Creek at all: the 1958 footprints that gave Bigfoot its name were found by a road construction crew. Mount Shasta has absorbed every new religious current to reach the West Coast since the 1880s, from theosophy to the I AM movement to the crystal shops that line its main street now.

Featured locations

Zone 1: The coast and the locked redwoods

Bohemian Grove

The Bohemian Club's summer encampment ran again this July, three weeks of the country's most powerful men in a redwood canyon at the end of Bohemian Avenue in Monte Rio. The ceremony everyone asks about, the Cremation of Care, is a musical play staged in front of a 40 foot concrete owl, and the only outsider footage of it dates from July 15, 2000, when Alex Jones and a cameraman walked in with a hidden camera. The 2026 encampment had a different kind of leak. In February, the journalist Daniel Boguslaw published a 2023 club roster of roughly 2,200 names, and the Press Democrat spent March naming the Sonoma and Napa men on it.

What you can see is Monte Rio, and Monte Rio is worth seeing. The town beach sits under the bridge on the Russian River. The Rio Theater has shown films in a Quonset hut since 1950. Across the river from the Grove is Northwood Golf Club, nine holes that Alister MacKenzie laid out in 1928 for Bohemian Club members, now open to anyone with a tee time, which means you can play the club's own golf course without ever being allowed through its gate. In July 2026, the Hoot Owl Gallery in town put on the first public showing of the Moore Papers, the activist Mary Moore's collection from decades of demonstrating outside the encampment, and a vigil gathered at the Monte Rio bridge the same weekend.

The boundary is the gate at the end of Bohemian Avenue. Nothing of the Grove is visible from any public road, and during the encampment the roads around it carry extra security. The gate is where the visit ends.

Druid Heights

There is no legend at Druid Heights, only a set of hand carved redwood houses that a poet and a carpenter built on a ridge above Muir Woods from 1954 on, and that the National Park Service has owned since 1977 and mostly left to fall down. Alan Watts died in one of them in 1973. The Park Service acquired the land through eminent domain as Muir Woods expanded, and the residents kept lifetime rights to stay. Some of those arrangements are still in force. Muir Woods' own management plan says the access lane, Camino del Canyon, is to become a foot trail eventually, and the Cultural Landscape Foundation put the site on its at risk list in 2018. The Save Druid Heights campaign is still pushing for stabilization, and the Park Service has replaced some roofs and cleared vegetation without committing to anything larger.

I went looking for a public vantage point and did not find one. The site is managed as a private residential property, unsigned, and people live there. The honest version of this stop is Muir Woods itself, which since 2018 has required a parking or shuttle reservation booked in advance, and the Panoramic Highway up to Mount Tamalpais afterward. Druid Heights is the story you carry through the trees, not a place you walk into.

Zone 2: Bigfoot country

Willow Creek and Bluff Creek

The Willow Creek-China Flat Museum on Highway 299 holds the Bigfoot Collection: plaster casts, sighting maps, and newspaper clippings going back to the 1958 Humboldt Times story that printed the word "Bigfoot" for the first time. Admission is free. It opens Wednesday through Sunday, 10am to 4pm, from May through September, and on weekends only in October, then closes for the winter. Outside, at the junction of Highways 96 and 299, Jim McClarin's redwood Bigfoot has faced the road since the summer of 1967. The town's festival, Bigfoot Daze, moved this year from Labor Day weekend to the last Saturday in June, so the 2027 edition will fall at the end of June too.

Bluff Creek, where Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot their 59 seconds of film on October 20, 1967, is a different order of trip. From Orleans, the Eyesee Road climbs into the mountains until it meets forest road 12N12. A short way along, 12N13 starts behind a gate that the Forest Service locks from late September to early June. Beyond the gate the road runs to a spur, 12N13H, that drops steeply to the creek. The Bluff Creek Project publishes turn by turn directions and relocated the film site itself in 2011 by matching tree stumps to frames of the film. Low clearance vehicles do not belong on 12N13H, there is no cell service, and there is no fuel past Orleans. The boundary here is the gate and the calendar. If the gate is locked, the film site is closed, and the museum is the day.

Zone 3: The mountain and the missing

Mount Shasta

The Lemurian story began with a teenager. In 1883, Frederick Spencer Oliver was helping stake his family's mining claim near Yreka when, by his own account, his hand started writing on its own. The dictating voice called itself Phylos the Thibetan. Oliver finished the manuscript in 1886 and died in 1899; his mother published it in 1905 as A Dweller on Two Planets, and its survivors of a sunken continent living in jeweled tunnels under Shasta have never left the mountain since. Guy Ballard added the next layer in 1930 with a claim that he had met the Comte de Saint Germain on the slopes, and the I AM Activity he founded still stages its Saint Germain pageant in Mount Shasta City every August. The name Telos, for the city said to be inside the mountain, came later still. Even the state's tourism office now trades on this: Visit California's Weird California podcast episode on Shasta covers the Lemurians and the Bigfoot lore in the same breath.

What you can see is a town that has organized itself around the legend. The Mt. Shasta Sisson Museum on North Old Stage Road is volunteer run, free, and open Thursday through Monday, 10am to 4pm, for the 2026 season, with exhibits on the mountain's geology alongside its history. Downtown, the shops on Mount Shasta Boulevard sell quartz labeled Lemurian, and outfits like Shasta Vortex Adventures run guided trips to springs and meadows they describe as energy sites. The Everitt Memorial Highway climbs out of town to Bunny Flat, the trailhead where the plowed road ends in winter. A little further up, Panther Meadows is a spring fed alpine meadow sacred to the Winnemem Wintu, open from early summer until around November 1, with 2026 fire restrictions in force on the forest.

The boundary is the meadow. The Forest Service asks visitors to stay on the trails and boardwalks at Panther Meadows and to give ceremonies space, and anything above Bunny Flat is mountaineering, with its own permits. The mountain will look exactly as extraordinary from the trailhead as it does from the summit, and the lenticular clouds that the internet calls motherships form over the peak whether or not you climb it.

The Yuba County Five

On February 24, 1978, five friends from Yuba City drove north to watch a basketball game at Chico State. On February 28, a Plumas National Forest ranger led deputies to their 1969 Mercury Montego in the snow on a mountain road above Oroville, nowhere near their route home. The ranger had passed the car on February 25 and thought nothing of it until he read the missing persons bulletin. On June 4, 1978, riders on the trails found Ted Weiher's body in a Forest Service trailer near the Daniel Zink campground. He had lived for weeks inside it. The remains of Jack Madruga and Bill Sterling were found the next day, and Jackie Huett's 2 days after that. Gary Mathias has never been found.

Jack Beecham, a former Yuba County sheriff who worked the case, told The Sacramento Bee in 2019 that the men "were either forced or manipulated." Netflix's Files of the Unexplained gave the case an episode in 2024, which is why more people are typing "Yuba County Five location" into search boxes now. There is nothing at the location. The spot is along the upper Oroville-Quincy Road, snowed shut from late fall into spring, with no marker and no trailhead, and the families who lost sons and brothers there have had 48 years of strangers driving up to look. The mystery is in the movements, in why the car went north when home was south, and it is well told from a chair in Oroville with the Feather River outside.

Regional folklore patterns

Two motifs recur. The first is the road that ends: the gate on Bohemian Avenue, the lane at Druid Heights, the locked gate on 12N13, the plowed road stopping at Bunny Flat, the mountain road under snow. In this region the boundary is nearly always physical and nearly always a road. The second is that every one of these stories was brought in by outsiders and left behind. San Francisco clubmen, a poet raised in Montreal, two rodeo men from Yakima with a rented camera, a mining family's son near Yreka. The Winnemem Wintu, the Hupa, and the Karuk have their own accounts of this same landscape, and Oh Mah, the name on the Willow Creek statue, is the Hupa word.

Before You Go

• Muir Woods needs a parking or shuttle reservation booked ahead. Druid Heights cannot be substituted for it.
• The 12N13 gate is locked from late September to early June. The Bluff Creek film site is a summer trip only.
• Fill the tank in Willow Creek. Orleans has limited services and the forest roads have none.
• Cell coverage fades out of Willow Creek on both Highway 299 and Highway 96. Download offline maps for the whole Klamath section.
• The Willow Creek museum closes after October and reopens in May.
• The Everitt Memorial Highway is plowed only to Bunny Flat in winter, and Panther Meadows closes around November 1.
• The Bohemian Grove encampment runs from mid July into early August. Monte Rio is busier, and the roads near the gate carry extra security then.
• The Yuba County Five road is snowbound from late fall into spring and has no facilities in any season.
• Fire restrictions on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest change through the summer. Check the current order before planning any camp stove use.

Planning a regional trip

The three zones connect in a clockwise loop that fits a week. Start in Marin with Muir Woods and Mount Tamalpais, cross to the Russian River and Monte Rio, then take Highway 101 north to Highway 299 and east to Willow Creek. From there, Highway 96 follows the Klamath River north through the Hoopa Valley reservation to Yreka on Interstate 5, and Mount Shasta City is a short drive south. Oroville, for the Yuba module, is a detour off Highway 70 on the way back down the valley.

Base towns are Monte Rio or Guerneville for the coast, Willow Creek for Bigfoot country, and Mount Shasta City for the mountain. June through September is the only window when everything is open at once: the Bluff Creek gate, the Willow Creek museum, Panther Meadows, and the full length of the Everitt Memorial Highway. A visit timed to the last Saturday in June catches Bigfoot Daze. A visit in late July catches Monte Rio during the encampment, which is the only time the Grove is felt in town.

Worth the Trip?

Each zone is a solid weekend on its own, and the whole loop is a week. It suits people who like the drive as much as the destination, since the destinations here are mostly gates. Anyone who expects to see the Grove's owl or walk into Druid Heights will be disappointed, and should know that before leaving. The people who get the most out of this region are the ones who go to Bluff Creek in July with a high clearance vehicle and a full tank, and who spend an evening in Mount Shasta City listening to what the town believes.

Responsible travel in this region

Panther Meadows is an active ceremonial site for the Winnemem Wintu, and the springs there are treated as sacred. Staying on the boardwalk is the whole of the etiquette. Highway 96 runs through the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation and Karuk country, and the Bigfoot stories that tourists come for sit inside older traditions that belong to those communities. People still live at Druid Heights under the terms set in 1977. Monte Rio hosts both the club and the people who protest it, and the town beach belongs to neither. The Yuba County Five are five men with families in Yuba City, not a set of coordinates.

At the junction of Highways 96 and 299, Jim McClarin's redwood Bigfoot was already standing when Patterson and Gimlin drove through Willow Creek that October on their way up to the creek.