Jack London's 150th birthday year fills the park calendar
Beauty Ranch marks a sesquicentennial with year-long programming, including an October 8 evening on the Sonoma Developmental Center's history.
GLEN ELLEN: Jack London State Historic Park is marking the 150th anniversary of the author's birth with a year of special programming at Beauty Ranch, the Glen Ellen property where London lived, worked and died.
London, born in 1876, bought the abandoned ranch in 1905 and spent his final decade building it into a working ranch and writer's retreat: the cottage he expanded, the stone Wolf House that burned before he could move in, and the grave site under a mossy boulder where he and his wife Charmian are buried.
The park's calendar includes an October 8 program on the history of the Sonoma Developmental Center, a neighbor whose story intertwines with the valley's. It is the kind of programming the park does well: using London's ranch as a lens on the wider Valley of the Moon.
The park is operated by Jack London Park Partners, the nonprofit that took over operations when state budget cuts threatened the park system. The partnership model has kept Beauty Ranch open and programmed, and anniversary years are when that model proves its worth.
For visitors, the 150th is an excuse to see the ranch with fresh eyes: the Wolf House ruins at golden hour, the cottage porch where London died in 1916, the trails climbing Sonoma Mountain behind the ranch. The park's 800-plus acres are the real exhibit; the birthday is the invitation.
Program details are available through the park. The Post's outdoors coverage continues with the fall trail season.
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