As you drive through some of California’s most storied agricultural land, a few hours north of the Bay Area, you’ll zoom past fields full of plants straining under the weight of their almost-ready-to-harvest bounty. After checking into your boutique hotel, you’ll get to sample some of the local flavor and watch the setting sun. The next day, you might explore some of the region’s historic spots.
Or maybe you’ll attend a friend’s wedding on a ranch next to a working farm. At the end of the weekend, you’ll drive home with some of the local wares and likely a deep emotional connection to the place you just visited. That may sound like a classic wine-country excursion in the Napa or Sonoma valleys, but what if you swapped in pot plants for grape vines and consumption lounges for tasting rooms? What would a weed head’s version of the wine-enthusiast weekend look like? To find out, I headed to Mendocino County, one of three counties that make up California’s famed Emerald Triangle, the historic cannabis-growing region of the state since the 1960s.
(It’s roughly triangle-shaped, with corners of its wide base in Humboldt and Trinity counties.) The Emerald Triangle turns out to be the perfect place to court canna-tourists the wine-country way. As the southernmost point of that triangle, Mendocino County has a bonus.
It’s much closer to major population centers such as San Francisco (about 110 miles) than Humboldt or Trinity counties (270-plus miles). It’s also .