Olompali, translated from the Miwok as “southern people” or “southern village,” lies just north of Novato, directly off Highway 101. It’s a state park these days but goes way back as the site of a…
Posts published by “Bruce Anderson”
Boonville’s first-wave hippies called a meeting one Sunday afternoon to discuss what to do about a loose knit, perhaps mythical, Boonville vigilante crew calling itself Cold Steel, whose stated purpose, if you could find it,…
In Boonville, real wilderness can often begin a few feet from the pavement, as it does throughout the Anderson Valley and much of Mendocino County. I would hike due west from my house, down into…
“I was born in Caddo Gap, Arkansas, on February 7, 1911, ain’t a third as big as Philo is now. I was the oldest in a family of eight sisters and a brother, the brother…
For thousands of years, Mendocino County history was memorialized in spirit rocks like the giant granite message board at the headwaters of Feliz Creek, and another near Cloverdale on the Russian River. All are federally…
A back page blip announcing an unnatural death rattled around in my head for a long time before I exorcized it by giving it a prose toe tag. In the November 9, 2005 edition of…
Tree Frog Johnson, aka Luis Reynaldo, was a free range pedophile who established himself in the Boonville area in the early 70s, mostly staying with his sanctioned catamite on the property of a back-to-the-land family…
The great hippie political takeover of Mendocino was still a few years away from that summer day in 1971 when we established our raucous brood in Mendocino County's serene summer hills, not far from the…
Feliz Creek today, where it passes beneath Highway 101 at Hopland is, in the summer, a parched expanse of dry streambed that is barely discernible as a water course. Only when it comes alive in…