The first guests said the coffee was better than the hiking.
Where the trail ends, rest begins
How Wild Meadow Trail came to be
Laura Harrington bought the property in the autumn of 2003, when it was still running a small cattle operation on about sixty acres of foothill land. The cattle were gone by spring. She spent most of 2004 clearing the old fence lines, cutting the first version of what is now the Meadow Loop, and converting the main ranch house into four guest rooms. The lodge opened that September with a hand-painted sign at the gate and a reservation book she kept in a kitchen drawer. The first guests were two retired schoolteachers from Pasadena who stayed four nights and left a note saying the coffee was better than the hiking. Laura still has the note.
40 miles of trail
The turning point came in the winter of 2008, when a group of eight trail runners from a local running club booked the entire lodge for a long weekend. They pushed Laura to mark the upper ridge properly and to build the log bridges over Dry Creek, which until then required a scramble. She hired a local trail crew the following spring, added four more rooms in the converted barn, and started keeping a written trail-conditions board that she updates every week. That running club still books a weekend every January, and the barn rooms are the ones guests ask for most because the ceiling is higher and the windows face the ridge.
8 rooms only
Laura Harrington
Laura Harrington has run Wild Meadow Trail since she converted a working cattle property into a hiking lodge in 2004. She manages the day-to-day herself: trail maintenance, guest check-ins, and the morning coffee that's ready before anyone asks. Before the lodge, she spent several years leading backcountry trips in the Sierra Nevada, which shaped how she thinks about trail safety and pacing. She keeps the property to eight guest rooms so she can give each group her full attention, and she still walks the perimeter trail every Sunday to check conditions firsthand.
Gear to borrow
Forty miles of marked trail
We maintain four loop trails ranging from a two-mile meadow walk to a fourteen-mile ridge traverse. Every trailhead starts from the lodge property, so you never need a car once you arrive.
No TVs
Eight rooms, no more
The lodge has eight rooms and we keep it that way. Breakfast is cooked to order, not buffet-style, and Laura knows every guest's name by the second morning.
Trails from the door
Trail conditions updated daily
Laura walks the perimeter trail every Sunday and posts written conditions for each route on the board by the front door. No app required.
Cooked breakfast