6. Arcata, California

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

This is a clean, hilly, walkable town, home to the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium and its feisty newspaper, Auto-Free Times. Often thought of as Haight-Ashbury reincarnated in the redwoods, Arcata weans its hippies from yesterday's drugs and turns them on to today's activism, although proximity to California's Emerald Triangle, famed for marijuana growing, may make them feel at home. This is headquarters for the Hundredth Monkey, a major anti-nuke group that every year buses hundreds of local residents to a protest march at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. As the country's pioneer in biological wastewater treatment, Arcata also offers habitat to more than 50 bird species at the treatment ponds, a.k.a. the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary.

Culture drifts in from Humboldt State University, whose 7,500 students, mostly studying natural sciences and the arts, live in solar-paneled dorms. The prevalence of food co-ops, alternative health care, and diverse ideas in Arcata must make up for the lack of night life; many of them stay on after college.

Part of cover story section, June/July 1997.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print