Wuss Camp

Wuss Camp is located one mile from the Pacific Ocean and four miles west of the Victorian town of Ferndale, California. We’re 30 minutes north of the spectacular Humboldt Redwoods and Grizzly Creek State Parks and within 60-90 minutes south of Prairie Creek and Sue-meg State Parks, Redwood National Park, and the mysterious Humboldt Lagoons State Park. All are easy and memorable day trips.

That said, hiking opportunities abound locally around Ferndale. Just blocks from Main Street Ferndale, Russ Park is a nature preserve with several miles of excellent hiking trails through more than 100 acres of mixed conifer forest home to many species of birds. Features include secluded Zipporah Pond and views of the Eel River Estuary, watersheds, and the valleys below. A mile from Wuss Camp is rugged and uncrowded Centerville Beach, and just up the road from the beach The Lost Coast Headlands offer Instagram-worthy vistas and hiking trails along coastal bluffs. Depending on the season, you may see wildflowers, coastal wildlife or even whales.

Our location includes 80 acres evergreen forests and pastures with a stream that runs through, fed by spring waters that flow down the hillsides. Once a dairy farm, today’s domestic animal residents include our friendly dog, Louie.

Early History

In early 1914, Paolo Gabrielli left northern Italy with slips of a grapevine in the lining of his coat, and immigrated to Ferndale, where two families from his tiny village had already relocated and founded dairy farms. Paolo’s wife, Felicita, and their three children were to follow soon, but they were delayed by the outbreak of World War I. In the meantime, Paolo purchased the farm one mile from the ocean from the Brown family, who still live own the adjacent property to the west. Paolo built a Tyrolean-style house, a chicken house (with a grappa still under the main floor), an outhouse, a corral, and a barn for his seven cows.

When World War I broke out, Felicita and the Gabrielli children were interned in a prison camp in Austria. There, their daughter died. Felicita and the boys, Virgil and Louis, joined Paolo in Ferndale six years later. Felicita died in 1940, and Paolo closed the dairy and went to live in town with his son Louis and his family. His son, Virgil, had become a priest. As Father Gino, he celebrated his first mass.

In 1947, the farm was purchased by Wendy’s aunt and uncle, Hazel and George Waldner, who recreated the house from the salvaging of the barn and the outbuildings. The Waldners kept it a non-working farm; they owned the local weekly newspaper, the Ferndale Enterprise. Wendy and her widowed mother lived on the farm with them until her mother remarried and they moved into town. In 1993, upon the death of Wendy’s aunt, she came home after 35 years in Los Angeles and New York, and began a new life in the peaceful bosom of the old one.