What amazed me most about our campsite was not its postcard-worthy view — although the beauty of our tent’s spot, set in a coastal meadow overlooking the rugged cliffs of the Marin Headlands, cannot be understated. It wasn’t even the weather, warm and sun-drenched in a place usually coated in a layer of fog. It was the fact that we were alone, in one of California’s most coveted camping destinations, at a site we’d booked only a few days before — a feat I wouldn’t have believed prior to my stay at Slide Ranch.
Despite being an avid camper and living in the Bay Area for almost a decade, I’d never even attempted to stay at any campgrounds within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area prior to this trip. Reservations there can be cutthroat — especially during September and October, otherwise known as Bay Area summer. Campsites at places like Kirby Cove are often booked up months in advance, and I’m much more inclined to drive the extra few hours to a national forest, where dispersed camping along dirt roads is free and bountiful. But after seeing photos of Slide Ranch on Hipcamp, which started listing the site on its app a year ago, I knew I had to experience the place for myself.
My girlfriend and I arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, slightly woozy from the winding drive into the headlands along Highway 1. The campsites at Slide Ranch are about a 15-minute hike from the visitor parking area, so we’d prepared for the trip the way we would for a backpacking trip — albeit with some extra luxuries like pillows and lawn chairs, since the ranch provides wheelbarrows to help guests transport their belongings down a rutted trail to camp. At the end of the trek, a golden meadow at the edge of the cliffs opened up to us, hugged by coastal grasslands and chaparral. This is where we’d be staying for the night. And besides a homely dome that we could use to cook our meals in, there was nothing and nobody else in sight.
Slide Ranch sits on a slope between Muir Beach and Stinson Beach, west of Muir Woods and under the shadows of Mount Tamalpais. It first was the site of a dairy before a developer purchased the property in the 1950s. It narrowly escaped from the claws of development in 1969, when the founder of present-day Slide Ranch, Doug Ferguson, purchased the land in order to prevent it from being turned into a luxury resort. It became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area the following year…