OUR STORY
The Coast Ridge was created from a simple belief: when we spend time in nature, move with consistency, and are deeply nourished, the body and mind remember how to reset. Set above the Pacific in Stinson Beach, California, the land itself is part of the experience. The culinary garden and micro-farm offer a daily reminder that care of self and care of the land are deeply connected. From this intention, The Coast Ridge brings together guided hiking, restorative practices, and plant-forward meals made with local organic ingredients in a small-group experience designed to build strength, restore energy, and create clarity. For many guests, time here becomes more than a retreat — it becomes a felt understanding of what truly supports lasting change.
Yarrow Schley
Co-FOUNDER
Yarrow has spent much of his life in the places where nature does its deepest work on people. Born in California's Eastern Sierra and shaped by years in Santa Fe, he came early to yoga, contemplative practice, and the steadying rhythm of time outdoors. These weren't pursuits — they were the way he understood the world.
A decade in Brazil, where he co-founded an NGO focused on ecological sustainability and community resilience, sharpened a belief that has guided everything since: personal well-being and care for the land are not separate concerns. They are the same concern, approached from different angles.
When he returned to California, the question that had been forming for years became unavoidable — why did people feel better in wild places, and what would happen if you built an experience entirely around that fact? Not a spa. Not a boot camp. Something rooted in the land, shaped by movement, and designed with enough care that guests could fully let go.
That question became The Coast Ridge.
At the retreat, Yarrow shapes the deeper rhythm of each experience — one rooted in movement, presence, and time in wild places. His approach is steady and grounded, inviting guests to reconnect with their own strength, settle the noise, and return to a more natural way of being.
Angela
Co-FOUNDER
Angela is a Bay Area local who has spent her life on the trails and at the table. As a lifelong nature enthusiast, she has walked coastal California since childhood and carried that practice farther — to Spain, the high routes of Peru, the Swiss and Italian Alps. She understands, from long experience, what sustained movement in beautiful places does to the quality of a person's thinking, their energy, their sense of what is possible.
Her equally deep connection is to food. Not food as fuel or food as discipline, but food as one of the most direct forms of care available — seasonal, generous, made with quality ingredients and genuine attention. When she looked at the wellness retreat landscape, she saw the same gap Yarrow saw: experiences that were either indulgent but passive, or demanding but joyless, and almost none that understood nourishment as something distinct from restriction.
At The Coast Ridge, Angela shapes the nourishing heartbeat of the retreat. Meals are plant-forward, organic, and prepared from ingredients grown in the culinary garden and sourced from nearby farms. Her approach is not about what is taken away — it is about what is added. Colour, variety, steady energy, the quiet pleasure of eating food that came from the soil a few feet away.
Her care extends through the entire atmosphere of each stay. From the table to the guest experience as a whole, Angela creates the warmth, ease, and intention that allows people to fully settle in and reconnect with themselves.
TOGETHER
Angela and Yarrow founded The Coast Ridge in the fall of 2015 because they believed something specific: that the most effective reset available to a human being is not a new protocol or a harder discipline — it is sustained time in extraordinary nature, real movement through wild terrain, food made from the land, and the experience of being genuinely cared for in a small, unhurried setting.
Everything at The Coast Ridge — the trails chosen, the pace of each day, the meals, the morning yoga, the evening quiet — reflects that belief. It is not a complicated philosophy. It is a very old understanding, returned to and made available again.
What they have built is both refined and deeply human. Guests arrive carrying the particular fatigue of modern life and leave having remembered something they already knew. That the body wants to move. That the mind clears in open country. That nourishment is not the same as restriction. That four days, done well, can shift something that months of effort had not.
That is what The Coast Ridge is for.
If you feel the pull to step away, move through wild country, and return with greater clarity and strength, we would be glad to help you find the right time to come.