On a sunny afternoon, Slide Ranch is a picture of rugged beauty perched above the Pacific. The rambling paths, gardens and outbuildings of this nonprofit environmental education center are overflowing with life. Groups of children laugh and shout as goats browse and chickens scratch by the compost bin.
April marks the fortieth anniversary of Slide Ranch, which was founded in the same month and year as Earth Day. The Muir Beach center serves 8,000 visitors annually, giving hands-on lessons in food, farming and environmental awareness.
“The program is phenomenal,” said Anastasia Pickens, a teacher who brings her fourth and fifth graders to Slide Ranch from San Francisco every year for an overnight campout. “My students have a deeper love of nature and wanting to care for the earth just because they’ve experienced such fun with it. You can guilt trip them – oh, yeah, plastics are choking the oceans – but Slide Ranch does a great job balancing that with pure joy.”
Making environmental education fun is a deliberate choice, says the organization’s executive director, Charles Higgins. “Without wanting to get too ethereal about it, we’re affecting the way that people structure their belief systems,” he said. “This is particularly important with children – how they develop their belief systems, and what they base their beliefs on.”
The value of work is one of the key lessons conveyed in an afternoon program at Slide Ranch. Kids help with various tasks around the farm, learning as they make cheese, turn compost, and feed and milk goats and other livestock. “It takes a lot of work to grow food, but all that is glossed over when you get it in a plastic package from Safeway,” Higgins said. “Getting children to realize that they need to be prepared to roll up their sleeves is an important part of the work that we do.”
Long Roots
The property now known as Slide Ranch was originally a dairy farm owned by a Portuguese family that emigrated from the Azores. But the dairy was isolated and access was difficult, and eventually the business closed its doors. A screenwriter bought the 134-acre property in the 1950s, and rented the farm’s outbuildings to various tenants who found the isolation a boon.
“It was kind of the Wild West back then,” Higgins said, arching an eyebrow. The record from those years is spotty, he added, but a number of sources suggest that the property was a hangout for drug dealers.
In 1969, the spot began on its current course. The Nature Conservancy and longtime Marin resident and philanthropist Doug Ferguson pegged the ranch as a good location for an environmental education center. The Conservancy bought the land with the help of $150,000 from Fergusen; they then enlisted the San Francisco-based Frontier Arts Institute to start an outdoor education program.
In 1974, the Nature Conservancy donated the land to Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Over the intervening years, the program has changed name and shifted its emphasis from art to ecology, but its overall mission has remained.
“The site continues to be used much in the same way that it has been for the last hundred years,” Higgins said. “The farm ethic and the sustainability ethic are more consistent with repairing and adapting existing buildings than to tearing them down and build all new buildings.”
This ethic – and the very existence of Slide Ranch in its present form – have been tested over the last decades. In the 1990s an ambitious Master Plan proposed replacing all the ranch’s characteristically weathered buildings – including those that date back to the dairy days of 1919. That plan fell flat due to fundraising failures. A second test came in 2008, when the Park Service threatened to relocate the entire facility. After substantial public opposition, that plan was also retracted.
Today, Slide Ranch offers three types of programs for visitors – one for families and one for school kids, as well as annual summer camps. Many qualify for a sliding scale, and many more visitors wander through uncounted as the ranch is part of a network of coastal hiking trails and always open to the public.
“Just remember,” one teacher said to a cheering group of kids from Marin Primary as they gathered for a closing ceremony last week, “If you ever want to come back to Slide Ranch – you can!”
Lesson in a Dome
In celebration of their fourth decade, the organization has been rehabilitating aging facilities. The key project is the refurbishment of a geodesic dome that has been one of the signature spots on the property since it was built forty years ago. The building was inspired by Buckminster Fuller and was dreamed up by Reno Taini, a teacher from Daly City, who brought his high school students to Slide Ranch each year. In 1971 he decided to give something back.
“He had the gumption to inspire his students – most of whom were girls – to cut all of the pieces in their woodshop,” Higgins said. He gestured to the building’s newly-painted and intricate support system. “Then they were trucked in here from Daly City.”
Standing about a quarter-mile south of the farm, the little building has been the destination of innumerable hikes over the years. The meadow surrounding it is where overnight campers pitch their tents, and where Anastasia Pickens brings her students each year. “For some kids is their very first time in a tent,” she said. “You can tell from their hiking that they aren’t used to uneven terrain. One boy, who is autistic, got into his tent and he was like, so where’s the light in here?”
This year’s campers will find that the dome’s familiar façade has received a modernist facelift. Plexiglas and plywood walls were replaced with a tight aluminum skin designed by staffer Steve Thompson in order to combat ongoing leaks resulting from the dome’s many angular surfaces.
Teachers at the ranch are likely celebrating another, less public project: construction of tidy one-room cabins to replace aging trailers that until now served as their housing for the year. Each cabin is designed for one person, was built primarily from recycled materials and has a priceless view of the sea.
“People who’ve been coming out for years have noticed that it still looks rustic but it looks less funky,” Higgins said. “I’m just pleased as peaches that we’ve gotten as much done as we have.”
(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light on 4/22/2010)
