Ask a visitor what Bonny Doon is, and they will say redwoods. Ask a neighbor, and the answer is stranger and more specific. This ridge sits on a bed of ancient marine sandstone that shows up in three places we all move through in September: the soil under the Pinot vines at Beauregard, the sand chaparral along the Silver Leaf Loop, and, indirectly, the parking field at Crest Ranch where the school fundraiser draws half the mountain each fall. The three anchors of a good late-summer weekend up here are not a random roundup. They are the same geology, expressed three ways.
Here is how to spend a Saturday on it.
Circle the Date: The Art, Wine and Brew Festival at Crest Ranch
The Bonny Doon Art, Wine and Brew Festival is the one afternoon each year when nearly every winery, brewery, and cottage-industry maker from this stretch of the mountains ends up in the same field. Past years have set the pattern: unlimited tastings from local wineries and breweries, an artist-and-artisan marketplace with jewelry, textile art, pottery, chocolate, and leather goods, food trucks including Sleight of Hand Pizza, River Dogs, Buzz Sushi, Trout Farm, and Parker's Picks, live sets from Santa Cruz bands like Space Heater, Velour, and Lefty Rosa, and a Mountain Makerspace running jewelry-making and botanical-dyeing classes on the side. There is a wine toss. There is a silent auction that has, in past years, included everything from an Ibis Ripley carbon mountain bike to San Francisco Symphony tickets.
The reason it matters, and the reason most of your neighbors will be there, is what the ticket funds. Proceeds go to the Art and Science programs at Bonny Doon School through the Bonny Doon Community School Foundation. If your kids or grandkids ever went through the district, the connection is direct.
Applications for 2026 food vendors, wineries and breweries, N/A sponsors, artists and makers, and musicians are open on the festival's site. If you have been meaning to pour, sell, or play a set, this is the year.
A practical note that residents figure out the hard way: VIP admission includes front-row parking, and Pine Flat Road backs up fast once the gates open. If you are going general admission, plan to carpool from town or from the school.
What You Are Actually Tasting at Beauregard
Beauregard Vineyards sits at 10 Pine Flat Road in a weathered wooden building that half the county has walked past without registering what it is. The building spent 25 years as Randall Grahm's original Bonny Doon Vineyard tasting room before the Beauregard family bought the property in 2008. Before that it was a general store. Before that, according to the family's own telling, it was a stop called The Lost Weekend that regulars referred to as the local civic center.
The family goes back further than the building's current use. Amos Beauregard, a retired sheriff's deputy, planted vines here in 1949. Today Ryan Beauregard is the winemaker and his father Jim manages the vineyards. Jim is the person who successfully petitioned for the Ben Lomond Mountain AVA, which was approved by federal regulators in 1988 and remains one of the more overlooked sub-appellations in California.
Here is the part worth knowing if you have lived up here for years and still order Chardonnay by habit:
- Ben Lomond Mountain sits above the fog line. The AVA runs from roughly 1,300 to 2,600 feet on the coastal edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
- It gets more rain than anywhere else in the county. Average rainfall on this windward slope is about 60 inches per year, which is why your driveway erosion is not just bad luck.
- The soils are sandy loam over limestone. The Beauregard Ranch Vineyard sits on southwest-facing slopes between 1,700 and 1,850 feet, three vineyards in the AVA, all family-managed.
That combination, cool air, long hang time, mineral-rich sandy soil, is why the Beauregard Chardonnays and Pinots taste unlike the same varieties grown ten miles east in Corralitos or fifteen miles north in the Ben Lomond flats. A glass at the Redwood Bar with the picnic tables under the actual redwoods is the shortest possible tasting-course in local geology.
The tasting room is open Wednesday through Monday, closed Tuesdays. Groups larger than six should call ahead.
The Silver Leaf Loop, or How to See the Sandhills Before the Heat
Most people who live in Bonny Doon can point to the Ecological Reserve on a map. Fewer have actually walked it. The 552-acre reserve was deeded to the State of California by The Nature Conservancy in 1989 and is managed by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. It protects a habitat called the Santa Cruz Sandhills, and this matters because the sandhills exist nowhere else on earth.
The trail to know is the Silver Leaf Loop, a 2.3-mile perimeter walk with an optional Ponderosa Cutoff that bisects the northern section if you are short on time. Elevation gain is modest, roughly 265 feet on the Ponderosa Cutoff version. The footing is deep sand in places, which is its own workout. On a clear morning the Pacific glints to the west.
What you are walking through is the exposed floor of a Miocene-era sea. The sandstone weathered into a habitat so specific that several plants live only here or in a few nearby pockets:
- Ben Lomond spineflower, federally endangered, low-growing, pink clusters
- Bonny Doon manzanita
- Santa Cruz wallflower
- Ben Lomond buckwheat
- Santa Cruz cypress
The reserve also holds the sandstone formation locally called the Moon Rocks, visible from the Silver Leaf Trail. The rocks themselves are closed to the public. Do not scramble on them. Everything about the sandhills ecosystem is fragile in ways that do not read as fragile.
A few things residents who walk this regularly already know but that a first-time visitor gets wrong:
- Park at the dirt lot near the Martin Road Fire Station, about a mile off Pine Flat Road. Turn onto Bonny Doon Road from Highway 1, right on Pine Flat, quick right on Martin.
- Walkers only. No bikes, no horses. Leashed dogs are allowed on the connecting trails but be aware of coyote sign, which is heavy in some sections.
- The regrowth you are seeing is from the 2008 Martin Fire and the 2020 CZU Complex. The skeletal manzanitas are not dead landscape. They are seed dispersers, and the profusion of ponderosa saplings under them is the second act.
- Bring more water than you think you need. Two liters is the standard local recommendation. There is no shade on the chaparral sections.
The reserve is cared for in part by local volunteers organized as the Friends of Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve. If you have been looking for a way to give back that does not involve a fundraiser dinner, they run trail work days year-round.
Stringing It Together
A reasonable Saturday, in the order that actually works:
- 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. Silver Leaf Loop while the sand is still cool and the raptors are working the thermals off the reserve's western edge.
- 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Coffee and a rinse at home, then over to Beauregard for a Redwood Bar flight. If the food truck is parked, you have lunch. If not, the family-friendly picnic grounds welcome an outside spread.
- 2:00 p.m. onward. Festival gates at Crest Ranch on the September date. If you have not been in a couple of years, notice how much of the vendor list is neighbors.
Three stops, one ridge, one geology. That is the version of Bonny Doon that only makes sense if you have been here through a few seasons.
If you have started thinking about what your own parcel up here is worth in this market, or you are quietly curious what the neighbors' place sold for last month, The Portola Group lives and works on these same roads. Start with our instant home valuation and we can take the conversation from there.
