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Perched high on a rugged bluff overlooking the Pacific
Ocean and the mouth of the Big River, the entire 19th-century New England-style
village of Mendocino, California, is listed on the National Register of
Historic Places. The village's innate charm, combined with the region's
breathtaking scenery and countless opportunities for outdoor adventure, has
turned Mendocino into a prime weekend getaway for Northern Californians.
 In the last quarter-century, dozens of
upscale, country-style inns and resorts have sprung up in and around town.
Among the most highly rated of these is the
Brewery Gulch Inn.
Less than a mile south of town, nestled into 10 acres of forest and meadows
above the sea, the 10-room inn has been heralded from its 2001 opening for many
reasons, including its dramatic design, gourmet cuisine, sumptuous service, and
jaw-dropping views.
Mostly, though, it's been acclaimed for the stunning
use of eco-salvaged virgin redwood, originally harvested around 150 years ago.
And therein lies a tale...
THE TALE
Back in 1850 a ship in the China trade ran aground
near present-day Mendocino, leading to the discovery of the region's extensive
virgin redwood forests. Before long an entrepreneurial San Francisco lumberman
sailed up the coast with a 50,000-foot-per-day sawmill, set it up on the Big
River, and went to work logging redwood trees.
With a life span ranging from 400 to 800 years, Sequoia
sempevirens are found only along California's northern coast, from
Monterey County to just beyond the Oregon border. The world's tallest tree, it
can reach close to 400 feet, and attains up to a 23-foot diameter at the base.
Redwood is valued not only for its beauty, but for its light weight and
resistance to both fire and decay. Starting around 1852 and until about 1910,
Mendocino supplied most of pioneering California's enormous demand for redwood
lumber.
In those faraway days, logs arrived at sawmills by
floating down a river. Most logging in the Mendocino area occurred during the
summer, when the Big River was low. Logs were hauled to the river by mule or
oxen. Twenty-seven splash dams were constructed on the river, and behind each
dam was a "deck"—a collection of recently harvested logs. As the deck grew
higher and heavier, logs at the bottom were eventually pushed down into the
river's silt. In autumn, when the river swelled from rain, the dams would be
dynamited open, allowing all the logs to rush downriver to the
mill—except, of course, for those logs buried beneath the river's bottom.
Year after year, more and more sinkers settled into the silt and mud. And there
they remained—many for as long as one-and-a-half centuries—until a
20th-century entrepreneurial lumberman set out to find them.
ARKY CIANCUTTI—A TRUE WOOD
FREAK
Arky Ciancutti, a self-described "wood freak," first
heard about the logs in 1995. Trained as a physician, he had practiced medicine
in the San Francisco Bay Area (among other things, he created and ran the
emergency department at Marin General Hospital). In 1974 he left medicine to
found the Learning
Center, a consultancy that provides team-building advice to the healthcare
community and a broad range of companies. He would also author a number of
books, including the acclaimed Built on Trust:
Gaining Competitive Advantage in Any Organization, which he coauthored
with Thomas Steding.
One of Ciancutti's first
Learning Center
clients was located in Mendocino. As he traveled back and forth between the
increasingly crowded Bay Area and the idyllic northern coast, he soon realized
that he wanted to base himself in the small town. So in 1977 he purchased 10
acres of prime Mendocino land containing an early pioneer's farmhouse, which he
gradually transformed into a cozy B&B (now closed).
Way in the back of his mind, Ciancutti played around
with the idea of building a larger inn. For the next 18 years, in between
professional and family obligations, he worked on obtaining permits and
pondered various ideas for a design. But the project never seemed to coalesce.
"For some reason I just couldn't get a clear idea of what I wanted it to look
like," he says today.
That changed abruptly one night when Ciancutti
wandered into a local bar and struck up a conversation with two burly, bearded
brothers from Arkansas involved in major earthquake retrofitting of the Big
River Bridge. Hitting it off, the three men tossed around stories for a few
hours. Before leaving, the brothers passed on valuable information: Their
industrial drills, they said, had hauled up red-colored wood shavings as deep
as 38 feet below the river bottom.
If that was true, Ciancutti knew, the shavings were
probably from first-growth redwood tress felled in the early days of Mendocino
logging. And—just like that—he knew what kind of inn he wanted to
build—if, that is, he could find and retrieve enough old-growth redwood
logs.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
Before Ciancutti could actually begin, he needed a
partner who knew the ropes and was willing to share knowledge. It would be no
easy matter, after all, to find and retrieve these waterlogged giants. A steep
learning curve would be involved, and more than a bit of courage: A river can
be dangerous at any time, but working around bobbing multiton logs during tides
and storms can be downright lethal. Three or four teams were already working
the river in search of submerged logs. Ciancutti eased his way into this
unusual and friendly community, working with a few different people until he
finally selected his partner, Scott.
Together the two men constructed a simple pontoon
barge made from two sealed road culverts filed with foam and covered by planks.
Suspended between the pontoons was a chain with tongs on one end and a 5-ton
mounted hand-winch on the other. At last, after gathering an assortment of
other equipment, some of which had to be specially designed and constructed,
they were finally ready to begin the search for "pumpkins" (prime timber).
Before too long the partners developed an effective
routine. Using probes, they discovered a log settled deep in the river's mud.
While Scott pried the log loose, breaking the vacuum beneath it with
pressurized oxygen flowing through a hollow wand, Ciancutti applied muscle
power to the winch one tooth at a time. No sandblasters or power shovels were
ever used. By beginning at low tide, they took advantage of rising water to
help ease the massive log loose. Ever so slowly the reluctant giant would rise
from its long sleep.
Once free of the mud, the reclaimed log would be
chained to the barge. The team then attached a 13-foot aluminum skiff behind
the pontoon, fired up the skiff's outboard motor—the only powered
mechanism used in the recovery process—and cruised on down the river.
Arriving at the mouth at high tide, they dropped the log from its chains close
to shore so that when the waters receded, the log would be left resting upon
the beach. And thus each of Ciancutti's reclaimed redwood logs completed a
journey that had been interrupted 150 years earlier.
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THE
RECLAMATION |
A pair of tongs at the end
of a chain was suspended between two foam-filled pontoons on either side of the
salvaging barge. |
After the logs had been
secured to the pontoon, a 13 foot aluminum skiff was attached behind it, the
outboard motor being the only powered mechanism that was used. |
Some logs had to be sawn
in half with a special 84 inch bar. |
Ciancutti learned how to
date the logs, which were originally harvested between 1850 and
1910. |
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LEARNING ABOUT THE
LOGS
Ciancutti took pleasure in learning how to date the
logs, which—originally harvested between about 1850 and 1910—fell
into three distinct time periods. A V-shape or "beaver-cut" meant that a log
was felled with an axe between 1850 and 1876, when the labor- and time-saving
raker-tooth saw was invented (in many beaver-cut logs they could see individual
axe marks).
Logs cut with a saw and dragged to the river by mules
or oxen were first shaved or edged around their circumference to prevent
snagging. Such trees were cut between 1876 and the arrival of "steam donkeys"
in 1895. All other retrieved logs were harvested after 1895.
Ciancutti was intrigued by another aspect of the
retrieved logs: the initials they often bore. In the early days, he learned,
logs were sold after felling but before being hauled to the river. Buyers came
directly to the forest to buy in large lots; once purchased, buyers stamped
their initials into each log's cut end. Only then were the logs brought to the
river and stacked in a dam to await the autumn rains. Most would eventually be
caught at the river's mouth, identified as to owner, milled, and then shipped
by boat to San Francisco.
Ciancutti and Scott had many Huck-and-Jim adventures
on the river. During one of the early trips, Ciancutti, who is not a good
swimmer, fell overboard wearing steel-toed logger's boots that filled rapidly
with water (he lived to regale others with this story). The pontoon wrecked a
few times, with both aboard. Once, after a violent winter storm, they found an
old logger's railroad axle brought up from the deep, and a few original
logger's railroad ties hand-split from first growth redwood.
 Soon after one of Ciancutti's logs was brought to the river's mouth
and stranded on the beach, it would be picked up by a logging truck with
hydraulic loading gear and taken "home" to his 10 acres. Waterlogged, weighing
six or seven times its normal weight, some of the logs were so heavy that they
had to be sawed in half before the logging truck could hoist and carry
them.
By mid-1996, nearly 30,000 board feet had been
salvaged. Buying and trading brought about another 100,000 feet of first-growth
redwood. At this point, the State of California began stepping into the
process, making it difficult to freely reclaim wood. The time had come for Arky
Ciancutti to move on.
QUALITY SAWING AND DESIGNING
THE INN
 Around this time he hired the
best sawyer he could find to wield a Wood-Mizer on the logs now piled on his
land. The sawyer kept the pieces as large as possible while retaining good
vertical grain. "Everything was quartersawn, milled down to large cants, all
clear, no knots," Ciancutti explained. "Tell your readers that we milled for
quality, not quantity. They'll understand.
During the sawing—which took nine
months—Ciancutti and others worked the "green chain," taking the wood off
the saw, sorting it, and storing it to dry. To move the wood, he enlisted the
help of his Dodge power wagon truck equipped with a boom capable of 16 tons of
lifting power. The wood was stickered with redwood spacers on level decks to
ensure perfect air-drying.
 While waiting for the wood to dry fully—a process that would
take three years—Ciancutti finalized plans for the inn. His design
concepts were helped along by what might be the most impressive assortment of
woodworkers living anywhere in the world today. That's thanks to master
woodworker James Krenov, whose work is in museum collections worldwide. Back in
1981, Krenov started a one-year Fine Woodworking Program a College of the
Redwoods in nearby Fort Bragg. Although Krenov retired some years ago, the
program is still going strong. It continues to attract serious woodworkers from
around the world, many of whom remain in the area after completing their
studies.
"A lot of them had never seen the kind of wood I had,"
says Ciancutti. It wasn't only that the wood was reclaimed, but that is was so
extraordinarily beautiful. After 150 years of resting in Big River's
mineral-rich water, the tight-grained wood was infused with tones of burgundy,
blond, red, purple, and hone-brown. It seemed to be lit from within.
The wood freaks helping Ciancutti refine his design
hailed from different parts of the world, and each had a unique perspective, a
singular taste. But one thing everyone agreed on was this: The wood should only
be used to create something as beautiful as itself.
And the Craftsman-style
Brewery Gulch Inn,
with its 35-foot-high central ceiling and open feeling, succeeds. From the
handcrafted entry door to the thick ceiling beams, the entire inn is an elegant
celebration of wood. The Arts and Crafts-style furnishings throughout the
public area reflect the architecture, with handsome tables of quartersawn oak
and comfortable lunge chairs sharing space with a soaring glass-and-steel
fireplace. Upstairs, all guest rooms feature the reclaimed redwood, including
decks, vanities, paneling, rafters, and frames on windows and French doors. All
told, about 16,000 board feet of Ciancutti's reclaimed wood was used to
construct the inn.
 The wood is everywhere,
sharing its beauty and open to admiration. At the same time, the building's
masterful design ensures that the wood never intrudes. Thus, for some guests
the reclaimed wood is merely a nice touch; for others it becomes a central
focus, awakening primeval and even spiritual feelings.
"For me," says Ciancutti, "the old growth wood is
almost sacred. I fell the same way about the people who were on this land
before us. The salvaging operation seemed to bring both worlds together:
respect for the people who founded this area, and respect for the old trees.
It's been a wonderful experience."
Author, Suzanne Rodriguez tackles a wide variety of
topics in her writing. She lives in Sonoma, California, and is currently at
work on her fourth book.
  
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