| Kila Springs ooze cold and clear beneath a canopy of redwoods, firs, tan oaks and wild rhododendrons a few miles east of the village of Mendocino, on the Northern California coast. The springs are named for the Siberian husky with one blue eye and one brown eye who first nosed them out as the source of a little creek that tumbles through densely wooded canyons toward the Big River far below. The river in turn empties into the Pacific Ocean under the bluffs and sea-caves that rim Mendocino Bay, 155 miles north of San Francisco. The Kila Springs Group and its imprint, Kila Springs Press, began life in a log house made of Western red cedar and lumber milled from trees felled to clear the site, upslope from the springs. A dirt track connects the property to a winding two-lane road that offers one of the most scenic, though arduous, drives in the United States. |
| East of the hamlet of Comptche, the pot-holed pavement ascends and descends a series of high ridges, winding past ranches and secluded backcountry retreats, threading the redwood grove that harbors some of the world’s tallest trees, skirting a venerable hot springs resort and topping out at almost 2,600 feet above sea level looking north to the peaks of the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness. Follow that road en route from Kila Springs Press, still based in Mendocino County, to the offices of the Kila Springs Group at Blue Oak Farm above Weber Creek, between Rescue and Lotus, in California's Motherlode.... |
