Last week, I was in San Francisco meeting up, checking in and talking creative strategy with Jeanine, RANGE’s founder and den mother. The weekend came quickly, so we closed our laptops and took off down the coast of California with Jeanine’s sweet pups and husband in tow. We had no big plans, just a scrap of paper scribbled with a name of a potential campsite, but that’s the way we wanted to play that day. No rules.
The drive was filled with surreal views of the Pacific, colorful produce stands and ambitious abalone divers wandering the beaches. It was my first time actually taking the time to explore California’s coastline, so we had to stop a few times for photos, tide pool play and fresh strawberries. When we reached Big Sur, we drove inland to find Bottchers Gap, a campground settled on a ridge overlooking a valley of redwood forests.
There were no official cheesy team-building exercises, but we worked together to setup tents, hang belongings, gather snacks and pop a bottle of wine without a corkscrew. That’s pretty much all we needed anyway — a bit of time to get back to nature and enjoy each other’s company on a quick jaunt above the fog, and around a picnic table in the woods.
Photography by Cooper Gill and Sydney Halle
XX SYDNEY