Summer Sonoma Foraging Campout

Campout Overview: What, Where, and When

Join us for a fun all-inclusive campout weekend filled with the summer treasures of the Sonoma Coast, featuring seaweed, sea urchin, coastal edible & medicinal plants, bioluminescent kayaking, and more!

True Grass Farms will be our home base for our weekend in Tomales Bay. They have hot showers, composting toilets, and a shaded outdoor dining area.

We will be journeying together around the Sonoma Coast on various foraging expeditions.

Three meals a day will be provided, which are a mix of foraged and farm-fresh ingredients.

Campout begins at 3pm on Thurs, and ends at 12 pm on Sunday, July 16-19.

Campout Schedule *

*All activities are optional - price is all inclusive except kayaking, schedule is subject to change

Thursday

• 3pm: arrive and settle in, farm tour, followed by dinner & evening community building activities

Friday

• Breakfast

• 6:15am Drive one hour along the beautiful coast to urchin foraging site (adding this time to acknowledge the earliness!)

• Morning activity: Urchin foraging

• Lunch (featuring urchin - unless you don’t want to eat it!)

• Afternoon Activity: Honoring the Urchin by Making Art with It

• Dinner

• Optionalevening add-on activity: Bioluminescent Kayaking 9-11pm (+$150 - not included in campout price) - 15 min drive from camp

• Alternate evening activity: For folks skipping kayaking, we’ll have campfire time back at camp.

Sat

• Breakfast

• Drive at 7:30 am to Seaweed Foraging and Plant Walk Beach (20 min)

• Morning activities: Seaweed foraging and Plant Walk (everyone does both)

• Lunch featuring seaweed and plants!

• Go back to camp

• Afternoon activity: Make seaweed foot baths and sea salt (to take home)

• Evening activity: campfire chill time

Sun

• Brunch

• Closing circle

• Pack up camp and depart by noon

Instructors

Ryn Sullivan (they/them) is our campout lead. They will shepherd the group and lead urchin activities. They bring over 10 years of experience in outdoor education and nature-inspired crafts to our team. As a backpacking guide, naturalist, and lifelong maker, they’re always finding new ways to work with what’s around us while caring for the ecosystem. They’ve been foraging since childhood and diving headfirst into their passion for the intertidal zone and all the creatures that call it home. They are involved in many sea urchin projects and are excited to teach Fork in the Path's students how to find and eat urchin as part of their holistic restoration efforts. When not foraging, you might find them teaching wilderness first aid classes, free diving for purple urchins, or crafting cordage from the irises in their backyard. Ryn is a certified Wilderness First Responder, yoga teacher, and California fishing guide.

Autumn Summers (she/her) is leading seaweed and plant activities. She is an avid wild foods forager, herbalist, gardener, and ethnobotanist. Autumn is passionate about sharing her 35 years of experience in an accessible and empowering way.  She teaches botany, medicinal plant cultivation, and how to safely and sustainably gather and use abundant wild edibles, including seaweeds and mushrooms in Northern California. She teaches at several herbal schools in NorCal and is the lead herbal educator for Herb Pharm.

Ricardo Romero Gianoli (he/him) is coleading urchin foraging. He has been living, foraging, and cooking in Northern California since 2008. One of his passions and career focuses is kelp forest restoration. Ricardo is a certified restoration scuba diver and kelp forest monitor who has surveyed sites from the Salish Sea to Orange County, but he focuses his restoration efforts on the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts. It is his greatest joy to connect people with the ocean through adventure, food, and education in the intertidal zone.

Mikhael Crystallah-Selk (he/him) is a mushroom instructor with Fork in the Path, but for this campout, he will be our chef. In addition to working as a high-end restaurant chef for most of his career, he is a leading mushroom identifier in California with more than a decade of experience foraging and studying the taxonomy of fungi. He is on the board of SOMA mycological association and is a group expert and moderator of some of the largest online mushroom groups.  He leads the identification tables at many of the Northern California mushroom events and leads guided mushroom walks around NorCal.