Dock Takes His Mom to One of California’s Last Wild Places, and Finds History Along the Way

A new video from the Humboldt Axe YouTube channel takes viewers on an unhurried drive through the Lost Coast, from the old stage stop at Capetown to the mouth of the Mattole River, with stops at Cape Mendocino, Prosper Ridge, and Petrolia along the way, and enough local history to fill a textbook.

Dock, the channel’s host, makes the trip with his mother on a clear spring day, pointing out tide pools, seals, zebras grazing in a Petrolia field, and a truck someone hoisted into a tree on Lighthouse Road. But between the scenery, he layers in stories most visitors never hear: the forgotten town of Gas Jet, where compressed natural gas once seeped from the ground and a stage line hotel served travelers until cars made it obsolete; the Mattole Lumber Company’s narrow-gauge railroad and its 2,000-foot wharf built out to Sea Lion Rock around 1908; the Punta Gorda Lighthouse, so isolated it was called the Alcatraz of lighthouses; and Ike Duncan, a Mattole native who reclaimed his family’s land under the Dawes Act in the 1890s.

The video is available on the Humboldt Axe YouTube channel. Hikers planning to follow the Lost Coast trail toward Punta Gorda should check tide charts before heading out — there is a narrow passage that becomes impassable at high tide, and cell service in the area is essentially nonexistent.