The hook
Two groves of thousand-year-old redwoods sit in the middle of Anderson Valley's wine country, and a Russian hermit once lived among them in shelters he built from fallen wood.
01Why it's worth it
Hendy Woods protects two stands of old-growth coast redwood, Big Hendy and Little Hendy, some of the trees past three hundred feet and a thousand years old, tucked improbably into the warm, sunny wine country of Anderson Valley rather than out on the foggy coast where redwoods usually hide. Locals will tell you to come here instead of the more famous Montgomery Woods, and they have a case: it's quieter, easier to reach, and it has the hermit. For more than a decade in the 1960s and '70s, a Russian immigrant named Petrov Zailenko lived in these woods, hunting and foraging and sleeping in shelters he wove from fallen redwood limbs, and the Hermit Hut Trail still passes one of them. He died in 1981, and his ashes went into the forest he'd lived in. The park also holds the only public stretch of the Navarro River in the whole valley, which makes it a swimming hole on a hot day.
02How to experience it
The park is on Philo-Greenwood Road near Philo, about two and three-quarter hours from the Bay, with a day-use fee. The Big Hendy Discovery Trail is a short flat loop through the biggest trees and is wheelchair accessible; the Hermit Hut Trail adds the shelters. It pairs with Boonville and the Anderson Valley wineries, and with the river for a swim when it's hot.