Treebones Resort

This one came after my time, so I will tell it the way my grandson tells it. On the bluff above Willow Creek, on the mountain side of the road, the Handy family opened Treebones in two thousand four: a village of yurts and tents looking out over the Pacific, off the grid by design, with a lodge, a pool, a sushi bar, and a woven nest up in the trees that you can sleep in. The yurts are few and they fill up, but you do not have to stay the night to stop here.

The lodge serves lunch at midday to anyone who walks in, and in the evening a set dinner from what the coast and the season give, by reservation. On a coast where the ranches once took in the traveler for a meal and a night, this is the modern version. That was the code out here: a stranger who came to the door was fed and given a bed, and nobody asked about his past.

One of those sojourners, the family story goes, was Jesse James himself, the most famous outlaw in America, fed at Sarah Plaskett's table in this valley and put up for the night, and gone up the trail in the morning like any other guest. Nobody in the house knew who he was until long after. Whether it was truly him or only a dangerous-looking stranger, that is what this coast was then: a place where anyone at all might appear at your door.

Treebones keeps the old rule: sit outside at dusk and watch the sea.