Burg savvy

A place of feral beauty and surprise
Just when you think that
there isn’t any magic
pink dogwoods happen
I live on the Russian River, with Fitch Mountain above me. In verbal shorthand, I say I live on Fitch Mountain. Some 330 homes make up this residential designation.
What holds Fitch Mountain together as a community is that we share one mountain, one road and one river.
As anyone who lives on a waterway, or on a road used by all can tell you, there is an interdependence based on this commonality, acknowledged or otherwise. The residents here live in direct communication with nature.
In the 20 years I’ve lived on the mountain, I’ve had visitations from deer, of course, but brazen ones who, straddling my tomato plants, stand their ground as I approach, foxes in profusion, opossums, raccoons, bobcats climbing up my stairs to the road, and even a wild boar, streaking down the slope from Bailhache, and swimming across the river like a shot, then loping upriver along the bank, his backbone bristles all aquiver.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know our mountain is the only protected urban peak of its kind in California. We owe a debt of gratitude to the city, the county, LandPaths, The Open Space District, Francez LLC and countless volunteers for making sure that our mountain will never be peppered with homes, leaving her a place of feral beauty and surprise.
When I first came to live on Fitch Mountain, I’d have to chauffeur my friends to my house from town, because they wouldn’t drive on our bumpy, windy, potholed road. In 2001, at the start of my real estate career in Healdsburg, many realtors wouldn’t come up here to sell property.
That’s changed as housing prices on Fitch Mountain followed the meteoric rise of home values in town. Even though we share the coveted zip code, 95448, we can’t vote on what happens in Healdsburg.
And when the city tightened its sanctions on vacation rentals, Fitch Mountain began to absorb the people who wanted a second home in Healdsburg and to offset the expense by using it as a vacation rental. One only needs to see the parade of luxury cars on Fitch Mountain Road and its tiny tributaries to see how much the demographic has changed.
The collateral damage here has been affordable cabins to live in, a fact I lament. But Fitch Mountain has always been a second home community, and its genesis was as a vacation community for the Bay Area.
Lots were sold at Camp Rose in the late 1920s, with families taking the train up from the city and spending the summers frolicking on the river while fathers came up on the weekends from their jobs.
I have a friend in his mid 60s whose family has owned the cabin, in which he and his wife now live, for 60 years, an uncommon scenario in our mobile society in California. There is a high concentration of artistic folks who live here, attracted by the beauty of the natural surroundings, the one of a kind nature of its dwellings, and the once affordable homes.
I love the wabi-sabi quality of the residences on Fitch Mountain, and the people who go with them.
I welcome all the newcomers to our mountain, but just as Sonoma puts new residents on notice that we are a “right to farm” county, I want new Fitch Mountaineers to know that nature comes first up here, the trees; the wildlife, the birds, the dark night sky and the luxurious quiet of a long, Fitch Mountain sleep.
Penelope La Montagne is a former Literary Laureate of Healdsburg, and is a Realtor at a local real estate brokerage. She can be reached at

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