Cazadero, CA

Cazadero is the kind of place where the town name and the landscape stay tied together: the community sits along Austin Creek as it runs toward the Russian River, in western Sonoma County’s redwood country. Its backstory is a railroad-and-timber one. The North Pacific Coast Railroad reached Cazadero in the 1880s, making the place an end-of-line shipping point for lumber and a route into the camps and wooded canyons. Today the central cluster still has the practical pieces of a small rural outpost—general store, post office, churches, repair shop, and volunteer fire department. Camp Royaneh, Camp Cazadero, and the Cazadero Performing Arts Camp give the area another thread, alongside the creeks that feed Austin Creek.