Quick answer
Bolinas is a beach town in Marin County whose residents have torn down the highway signs pointing to it since the late 1960s to keep tourists away. It sits on Bolinas Lagoon, a Ramsar-listed wetland, and its coastline includes the tide pools of Duxbury Reef.
Full transcript
The Town That Isn't on the Signs
The road into Bolinas is unmarked. Signs on Highway One pointing toward the village have been torn down by residents for decades, and when the state replaces them, they vanish again. The voters made it official in 1989, rejecting a measure that would have allowed signs by nearly three to one. Caltrans even tried painting the name on the asphalt; locals blacked it out with tar. The town has been at this since the late nineteen sixties, and it is not a prank — it is a policy, approved by the people who live here.
Lagoon and Fault
What they are protecting sits at the bottom of a fault line. Bolinas Lagoon, the shallow bay behind the town, lies in a trough carved by the San Andreas Fault, which runs its full length — the Point Reyes peninsula and Bolinas itself are creeping north on the Pacific Plate. The lagoon is a Ramsar wetland of international importance, and at its mouth the tide pools of Duxbury Reef hold a protected slice of the open Pacific. The town's history runs deeper than the privacy campaign: this was Rancho Las Baulines in 1846, and its first post office opened in 1863.
What to Do
Come the way the town intends: unannounced, on foot. Walk the sand at Brighton Beach or along the lagoon edge where the birds work the mud; at low tide, the rocks at Duxbury Reef open up with anemones and starfish. The Bolinas Museum, founded in 1983, holds the town's history in five small galleries. Find your way there, buy nothing flashy, and end at Smiley's Schooner Saloon — the bar where the town has argued about its signs for generations.