The tiny Bay Area town modern life forgot: Canyon, Calif.


On a sun-flecked September morning, along the valley floor of a lush redwood ravine just miles from San Francisco, I’m led into a small wooden classroom by a bright-eyed former treehouse-dweller, anarchist and community leader named Esperanza Surls. Inside, a small group of students aged 10-14 deconstructs Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Outside, a creek babbles under ancient, towering trees.

Now in her early 60s, and helping out as a substitute teacher today, Surls moved to this remote town at the age of 11 after her father saw some graffiti there that read “We love you” and decided to make the valley home.

At the time, Surls was the only student in her eighth grade class. “It was fun for me,” she laughs. “I was a precocious child. It was wild hippie days.”

Over its storied history, this East Bay settlement has been a wild lumber town; a battleground between suburbia and nature; a drug-fueled biker hangout; and the site of an almighty explosion that some presumed was the start of nuclear war. Most people in the Bay Area don’t know it exists, which is how many of the residents want it. Here’s the story of the little town over the hill, all but lost to time — Canyon, California. 

Lumbermen, squatters and a whiskey-drinking pig

Since the Caldecott Tunnel bore through the Berkeley Hills in 1937, embarking on the long and winding road over the hills to get to Lamorinda and beyond is an unusual endeavor, but it’s worth the drive.

With an almighty view of the bay behind while you cross the Alameda County border where Skyline meets Pinehurst, you get a brief glimpse of Mount Diablo, welcoming you to Contra Costa County. From there, the road descends through multiple hairpin turns into a valley flanked with redwoods and madrones, before finding the bottom, where a railway used to run alongside San Leandro Creek.

Despite the drought, deep in the canyon on a Friday morning, the cool air smells of moss and the creek flows strong. The sunlight that manages to find its way through the lofty evergreen limbs dapples the pavement and the graffiti-covered retaining wall that stops the road from collapsing into the creek. (A co-worker who grew up in nearby Moraga remembered this remote spot was where high school kids would go for an evening to hang out, smoke and do what bored teenagers do.)

Canyon, Calif., is pictured in September. 

Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

It was the abundance of coastal redwoods here — one of the tallest, and oldest, living things on Earth — that birthed what would become the unincorporated town of Canyon more than 170 years ago. Throughout its history, the settlement had been known as The Redwoods, then Elkhorn, then Sequoia Canyon, then finally Canyon in 1922.

In the 1850s, those giant sempervirens, some more than 1,000 years old, were decimated, without a thought for conservation, to help build the metropolis of San Francisco, and later Oakland growing over the hill, in the wake of the Gold Rush. It’s said that it was wood from a redwood in this valley that was used to build Mission San Jose long before San Francisco was founded.

During its logging heyday, the peaceful drive today along Pinehurst Road toward the only two establishments remaining in town was a rowdy thoroughfare of hotels, saloons, brothels, lumber mills and homesteads.

The bars had an “ancient rustic taste for cruelty to animals,” John van der Zee wrote in his 1972 book on the town, “Canyon.” Entertainment there in the 1850s reportedly included cock fighting and a whiskey-drinking pig. 

Hotel in Canyon, California, circa 1890s. 

Hotel in Canyon, California, circa 1890s. 


Archival / Unknown

Summit Saloon, Canyon, California. Date unknown. 

Summit Saloon, Canyon, California. Date unknown. 


Archival / Unknown

A hotel and bar in Canyon, Calif., circa 1890s.

As the lumber industry took over the canyon, cabins and squatters’ shacks dotted the forest’s steep hills among concealed private roads. It was also the site of violent land feuds that would continue in one way or another into the 1960s.

“Shootings, reprisals, pitched battles, cattle thefts, and lawsuits so heated,” van der Zee wrote. “Nearly every house on disputed ground was a fortress of arms and ammunition.”

As with much of the plundering of California’s natural riches of the era, it wasn’t long before most of the trees were felled — some leaving 20-feet-wide stumps behind — and the lumbermen, saloons and drunk farm animals left the canyon, leaving San Leandro Creek to flow peacefully again.

In 1913, a relatively short-lived train tunnel was drilled through the mountain linking Oakland to Canyon. It formed part of the Sacramento Northern Railway line that would run all the way from the bay to Chico (though the passenger line was decommissioned by the 1940s). The opening of the passenger railway ushered in a quieter time in the valley, and led to the construction of the schoolhouse and a new post office in 1918.

Fighting off suburbia in the secret valley 

In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement and counterculture revolution were in full force over the hills in Berkeley, a group of radicals created an enclave in Canyon. There, they sought to live off the grid, in secret, at one with the earth as the back-to-the-land movement grew. The unnamed roads that climb the hillside forest off Pinehurst Road were privately maintained, as they are today. Signs made it clear outsiders, and encroaching suburbia, were not welcome in Canyon.

Cabins, makeshift shacks and the most ’60s of California dwellings — geodesic dome houses — sourced their own water supply and lived without television, street lights or much communication with the outside world as the city of Oakland and its 350,000 residents teemed only a mile away. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

Stories tell of the longhairs and radicals there turning away curious visitors with deliberately wrong directions as development threatened the hippie paradise. The East Bay Municipal Utility District was buying up cabins in the valley, only to raze them to the forest floor and claim the land to create a subdivision there, i.e., suburbia, according to van der Zee and the Contra Costa Times. The water company claimed the unsanitary conditions in the settlement were polluting the nearby Upper San Leandro Reservoir.

In February 1969, the Contra Costa County sheriff led a posse of building inspectors, narcotics agents and even a dogcatcher with a tranquilizer gun into the valley to evict half of the residents. A Contra Costa Times front-page story reported that eviction notices threatening to jail residents who attempted to reenter their homes were pinned to a child’s treehouse, a chicken coop and a hay barn. One resident was told he needed two off-street parking spaces to come up to code. “I don’t even have a street!” he told the newspaper.

The heated standoff ended peacefully, and no arrests were made after residents strategized and formed a barricade as a tipped-off TV news crew watched on.

A month later, tragedy struck the town when someone bombed the Shell gas line that ran through the valley with dynamite. The ruptured pipeline spilled jet fuel into San Leandro Creek, which later ignited in a second horrific explosion, sending a sheet of fire through the valley. The sound and fury of the blast led some residents to believe Russia had dropped the bomb. Van der Zee’s book recalls one resident stopping cars from entering the valley, telling them that everyone was dead.

In fact, the tragedy took just one life, a Shell employee who was inspecting the damage to the pipe and witnessed the fuel rushing into the creek. He was in a phone booth warning people about the danger when the river ignited. The explosion also injured five sheriff’s deputies, torched eleven cars and burned the post office and general store to the ground.

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

The post office would eventually be rebuilt, but the Canyon Store, which dated back to 1855, never returned, forcing residents to thereafter venture out of the ravine into suburban Moraga — just 4 miles, but really a world away — for groceries. The bombing suspect was never identified.

In a pushback against the perceived “hippie” stereotype laid upon Canyon residents in the late ’60s, one mustached resident told the Contra Costa Times to look back at Canyon’s history, not what was happening at the Cal campus over the hill. “Heck, those homesteaders who lived in Canyon in the old days look like ‘hippies’ to me. Go look for yourself at the historic photos. … We identify more with those pioneer cats, not the drop-outs.”

Unlike the similar dispute between radicals and The Man that was playing out in violent battles on the houseboats of Sausalito at the time, the fight for Canyon ended relatively quietly. After a series of lawsuits and sympathetic press, the community saved its independence.

“We fought the battle, like a mouse that roared. We were well organized.” Surls remembers as we walk alongside the creek. “Basically, the county and the water company were like, ‘You don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.’”

Surls leads me to a magical opening in the redwoods known as the Grove. She remembers one very Canyon day, over 50 years ago, when as a 12-year-old on recess, she saw a gang of bikers gather at the spot to perform a very unorthodox wedding there.

“They brought a bag with 75 hits of mescaline,” Surls remembers. “So my brothers and I went out to watch his biker wedding. They poured all this mescaline in a bowl, so we decided to try it. I think we had most of it.”

She says her teacher was cool with it, telling the drugged children to go into the forest and draw the trees. “We were having the time of our lives. It was fabulous.” That freedom also resulted in Surls skipping high school altogether. “I became one of the adults,” she says. “Age was just a number.” 

Canyon, Calif., is pictured in September. 

Canyon, Calif., is pictured in September. 

Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Today, Canyon Elementary is thriving. Its mantra “One school, 72 students, 10,000 redwoods” accurately evokes the school’s separation from the modern world. The sight and sound of schoolchildren enjoying recess, laughing and playing under the giant trees, is as bucolic as you can imagine. Rather than learn inside, one class gathers around the trunk of a wide redwood to listen to the teacher as shards of light occasionally fall onto the students’ textbooks. The valley floor feels both physically and spiritually distant from the Bay Area’s bustling urban sprawl and 8 million neighbors.

Few homes in Canyon have mailboxes, so residents collect their mail from the historical post office, making it something of a community hub (albeit a quiet one). Flyers and notices pinned to a redwood outside note an upcoming Redwood Highway Road Association meeting, the current fire risk, “Free Day” at the post office and a “No Trespassing” sign somehow still adorned with an “Impeach Bush” sticker. In the ’90s, an irreverent self-published zine named the Polar Bear Journal would mysteriously appear, staple-gunned to the tree every month, for the community to read. No one ever identified the budding journalist.

Until 2012, the post office — which has been there in one form or another since 1852 — had a full-time postmaster stationed there, a local hero named Elena Tyrrell, who was said to be so essential to the community that police and fire crews would rely on her for directions into the mazelike hillside paths.

Today, postal worker Ed Javier, who commutes 20 miles from Richmond every day, tells me some days he only sees five customers, stopping by to pick up their mail. “I’m a city man,” Javier laughed. “It’s too quiet for me here.”

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 

Canyon, California. Sept, 2020. 


Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

“Canyon is the Other against which the larger society can be measured,” van der Zee wrote. “A lone rustic outpost in a wilderness of urban growth, without a sidewalk, a sewer, a street light, or a public official.”

A 1997 dispatch by resident and journalist Chris Lavin described the politics of the town as largely void of ideology. “Those who pay dues to the National Rifle Association live beside members of the Sierra Club,” Lavin wrote, “and occasionally everybody sits down and shares a pot of coffee.”

Or as one resident put it in that story, “When you’re shaking a man’s hand, he can’t hit you with it.”

While it’s true that Canyon life has been largely crime-free since the late ’60s turmoil, in the early ’90s, a real-life devil visited the community, revealing that it wasn’t just an escape from modern life that residents sought within the anonymity of the valley.

A man named David Barnard, known locally as the “Devil Man” because of his fondness for shaping his hair as horns and wearing a black cape around the town, was accused in 1992 of sexually abusing his young daughter in their cabin in Canyon. The court case revealed that the cabin was the site of abuse and years of depravity in a litany of horrifying and lurid details — criminal behavior in which Barnard’s wife also participated. Barnard was found guilty of 116 counts of sexual abuse, resulting in the longest prison sentence ever handed down in Alameda County, 342 years. His wife, an Oakland school psychologist, was sentenced to 17 years for her part in the atrocity.

Canyon Elementary School serves the small community of Canyon, Calif.

Canyon Elementary School serves the small community of Canyon, Calif.

Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

Today, the approximately 80 residents of the town still maintain their own roads and rudimentary sewage system. Above the schoolhouse, a 24,000-gallon tank gravity-fills the classroom’s water. Real estate records reveal that not a single property, of which there are about 80, has changed hands in the last five years. The once-unmarked roads into the hills are all now named, though they still are privately owned by the community, and visitors should not enter without permission, as dozens of signs make clear.

While the spirit of counterculture revolution may be less urgent in Canyon, the embrace of nature is still integral to life here. The stretch along Pinehurst Road is still strikingly undeveloped.

Handwritten (and sometimes misspelled) “5 mhp” signs flank the Redwood Highway. The old railroad crossing sign still stands crooked. Abandoned cars line the roads. Strewn luggage cases and broken-down motorcycles lie among the homes, some of which appear to be built with whatever materials were nearby. Residents’ names adorn the house signs alongside street numbers. On the main highway, Lamorinda-type spandex cyclists speed through, outnumbering cars.

Outside of the wayward drug-fueled adventures, Surls fondly describes the community of volunteers sharing food and housing, hosting parties and weddings. She tells me that there was no television in the town when she was a kid, and for a period she lived alone in a treehouse. When I ask about the location of the old railway, she takes my notepad and proceeds to sketch the entire town, each winding road and home and family history from memory, like the back of her hand.

“It was a social experiment we were all part of,” Surls says. “Those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in that period, we probably experienced as much freedom as any human being in the history of the world.”

No traffic lights or freeway hum invade the senses in Canyon. My phone showed not a glimmer of cell reception. The air tasted cleaner than anywhere else in the Bay Area.

Above, California towhees chattered and red-shouldered hawks circled as I headed home toward a more familiar, busy Bay Area life. 

Near the Oakland border at the top of the mountain, a convoy of 12 roaring motorcycles passed me, destroying the tranquility, their drone fading as they descended into the peace and history of the valley below.  

Canyon, Calif., is pictured in September. 

Canyon, Calif., is pictured in September. 

Andrew Chamings/SFGATE



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