Druid Heights

In 1954, carpenter Roger Somers and poet Elsa Gidlow bought five acres of a failed chicken ranch on a ridge above Muir Woods and began building a world of their own. Gidlow, who in 1923 had published the first openly lesbian poetry collection in the United States, named the place Druid Heights for the Irish mystic Ella Young and for Wuthering Heights. Somers filled it with swooping, hand-carved redwood architecture that obeyed no building code and no straight line. For two decades the colony ran on conversation, craft, and privacy: Beat writers in the 1950s, the counterculture in the 1960s, the women's movement in the 1970s. Alan Watts, the century's great interpreter of Zen for the West, moved into a house on the property in 1971 and had a library built there for his Society for Comparative Philosophy.

The guest list is its own document: Gary Snyder, Ram Dass, Lily Tomlin, and a parade of names who came up the unmarked road to talk, soak, and disappear from public view. Watts died at Druid Heights in 1973; Gidlow died there in 1986; Somers stayed until his death in 2001. The National Park Service bought the land in 1977 as Muir Woods National Monument expanded around it, and then largely left the buildings to rot. In 2018, the site was formally determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, and a preservation campaign has been pushing the Park Service to stabilize what remains before the redwood sculpture houses fall in on themselves.

There is no legend to debunk here, which is what makes the place strange. One of the most influential countercultural sites in America sits inside one of the most visited parks in America, unsigned, unmapped by the Park Service, and mostly unknown to the crowds a few hundred meters away at Muir Woods. The open question is bureaucratic rather than supernatural: whether the buildings get preserved or are allowed to finish collapsing, and whether the quiet that protected Druid Heights for seventy years ends up erasing it.

Druid Heights is not currently open to visitors. The National Park Service asks visitors to respect the privacy of residents who still live there. Do not follow informal walking directions to the property or enter its buildings.

A reservation for Muir Woods provides access to that visitor area, not permission to enter Druid Heights.