We just don’t know what we are transitioning to yet.” “We are, as they say, an economy in transition,” said Alison Glassey, a social welfare administrator in Mendocino County. The two others see their future in launching businesses and sprucing up downtowns and town squares for the benefit of tourists drawn by the region’s rugged beauty.
Hope in one county came with a new state prison. Together, they hope to transform it into a prime destination for eco-tourists, a haven for well-off retirees and a magnet for entrepreneurs producing innovative products.įrom Del Norte, on the Oregon border, to Mendocino, close enough to San Francisco to be a favorite weekend getaway, people are finding inventive ways to keep hold of their small-town way of life while building the foundation of a new economy. The region’s largest town north of Arcata, Crescent City, is a tortuous, seven-hour drive from San Francisco.īut determined longtimers and an influx of newcomers from Southern California and elsewhere are coming up with new ideas, schemes for capitalizing on the North Coast’s distance from urban chaos. Barely more than 230,000 residents share 20% of California’s total land mass and one-quarter of the state’s coastline. Humboldt, the North Coast remains sparsely populated. Grant reportedly was driven to drink by the loneliness of his Army posting at Ft. “Come back in five, 10 years and we are going to be right up there with the rest of the world.”Ī bold claim, perhaps, for a region so physically isolated from the rest of California that its residents joke about living “behind the Redwood Curtain.” “We’ve been lagging behind for a long time, but we are right on the verge of rolling into the 21st century,” said Del Norte County Supervisor Clyde Eller. The region’s disparate communities are learning that they share a common love for the land and a common goal: survival. They’re water and ecosystems.”īut whatever the arguments over the past, the people of the North Coast agree that now, even in towns as down and out as Orick, signs of rebirth are finally emerging. “People have come to understand that the forests are more than just timber. They aren’t going to get to log all the rest,” he said. “The North Coast is changing because it has to change,” said Joe Gillespie, a Del Norte native who has been labeled a renegade by some neighbors because he helped found the environmental group Friends of Del Norte County. Logging and fishing families cite government and interfering environmentalists for imposing severe restrictions on the amount of wood and fish they can harvest from the region’s forests, streams and coastal waters.Įnvironmentalists fault logging companies for overcutting forests, eroding hillsides and silting up stream beds vital to salmon habitat and a once-thriving fishing industry.
Who to blame for the hard times depends on who you ask. For most of the 1980s and the early part of this decade, the three counties of the North Coast-Del Norte, Humboldt and Mendocino-endured unemployment rates far higher than the state average and a collective depression brought about by the passing of logging and fishing as a way of life.
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