The Mountain Home Inn, 810 Panoramic Highway, Mill Valley, Calif., as seen in August 2023.
Andrew Chamings/SFGATE
As luck would have it, the evening I drove up the eastern slopes of Mount Tamalpais to stay at the iconic peak’s historic hotel was also a blue moon. As I arrived, diners and drinkers on the old redwood deck looking out over the forests of Marin watched the rare moon rise from one of the best vantage points around. And the serendipity didn’t end there. Serenading the crowd was a man named Wolff, who didn’t quite howl at the moon but instead sang pretty Neil Young covers into the twilight.
Built over a century ago by Swiss German immigrant couple Claus and Martha Meyer, who were homesick for their native Alps, the inn has a long, storied history that includes a tragic crash, a famous prisoner of war and a chance meeting on the mountainside.
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Long before the asphalt of the Panoramic Highway moved motorists over the mountain, a winding railroad known as the crookedest in the world climbed nearly 300 turns from Mill Valley to the summit and returned passengers through a rudimentary and heart-stopping railway system powered only by gravity. At one of the train stops, atop a ridgeline over Muir Woods, Claus and Martha built their home and refreshment bar for hikers making their way to the top and back, a place to rest their bones and take in the view with some hot soup and lemonade. The Meyers sold housemade candy at Christmastime and soon added a dining room on the mountain ledge. By the late 1920s, the crooked railway was abandoned as the mountain road was paved for automobiles — a change that would prove tragic for Claus.
The Mountain Home Inn was built in 1912 by a Swiss German couple to provide refreshment for hikers on Mount Tamalpais.
Courtesy Mountain Home Inn
Learning to handle the new technology of a motor car in 1930 was no easy feat, and it was even harder on the side of a 2,500-foot mountain. That summer, Clause and Martha were reportedly giving their new Model T a spin when Clause reversed over the steep bank, sending the car and the couple plunging down the mountainside. The couple somehow survived the horror, but Clause died three weeks later of a stroke, having never recovered from the crash. Martha died not long after.
The inn changed hands numerous times in the following years, largely maintaining its German theme. In the 1950s, up to 800 tourists and hikers reportedly stopped by on busy Sundays to be greeted by wait staff in lederhosen and dirndls. In the ‘60s, notable guests included Goldie Hawn and the Grateful Dead. But by the ‘70s, during a time when the mountain was a notorious dump site for at least one serial killer, business dwindled. (Both the “Trailside Killer” David Carpenter and the “Game Show Killer” Rodney Alcala are known to have killed or left victims there.) The inn shuttered for the first time in 1976, after the owners of nearly 25 years retired. New proprietors tried to rebrand the place “Sky High,” though the renaming bothered some locals, who thought it sounded more like a nightclub than a tranquil mountain lodge.
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That endeavor was short-lived, and the property soon fell into the hands of a German American war hero later played on screen by Christian Bale.
Dieter Dengler was a German-born U.S. Navy bomber pilot who was shot down over Laos, captured and imprisoned in the notorious Pathet Lao prison camp during the Vietnam War. After six months of torture, Dengler somehow escaped, becoming the only American to ever do so and survive the prison. After 23 days on the run in the jungle on the shores of the Mekong River, hallucinating through near starvation, Dengler was rescued by a U.S. Air Force plane. His story was adapted into Werner Herzog’s 2006 epic “Rescue Dawn.”
The Mountain Home Inn, 810 Panoramic Highway, Mill Valley, Calif., as seen in August 2023.
Andrew Chamings/SFGATE
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Once back on American soil, Dengler bought the old Mountain Home Inn to live in peace, away from the world.
Around the same time, another Vietnam vet and former military rescue pilot, Edward Cunningham, was living in Marin. Cunningham had spent time on an Air Force base in England, and while there, he fell in love with old British pubs. After failed endeavors importing British race cars and opening an art gallery in Sausalito, Cunningham was looking for something new.
“He was broke and living off peanut butter,” his wife, Susan Cunningham, tells SFGATE.
It was around then Edward Cunningham noticed the construction of a very un-California restaurant and hotel at the base of Mount Tam — the Pelican Inn at Muir Beach. The pub was built beam by beam from materials shipped over from England and Scotland, and it still has the bona fide look of a Tudor watering hole today, despite being built in 1979. Cunningham befriended the Pelican’s creator, Charles Felix, as he continued searching for his own old place to run.
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The Mountain Home Inn, 810 Panoramic Highway, Mill Valley, Calif.
Andrew Chamings/SFGATE
One day, while jogging out on the Panoramic Highway, Cunningham saw the old Mountain Home Inn, closed and in a bad state. Dengler had not been able to keep the historic restaurant open. “He had put up a ‘for sale’ sign,” Susan says. “And my husband walked over and just bought it on the spot.”
By chance, the two veterans had a brothers-in-arms connection. “Dengler escaped, and it turns out the people that rescued him were my husband’s search-and-rescue group,” Susan says. “They had this incredible bond. It was kinda sweet.”
The Cunninghams spent years making the inn what it is now. “It’s the only commercially zoned place on the mountain. It’s a beautiful site, but people only come up there when it’s hiking weather,” Susan says. “So my husband figured out the only way we could make it is if we had overnight rooms.”
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Four years later, in April 1985, after a lot of complicated permitting and plumbing (when the Cunninghams bought the building, the nearest septic system was 1.5 miles down the hill in Mill Valley), the inn reopened. With a new look, a new menu and 10 cozy guest rooms, the launch caught the eye of the media.
“It was a huge splash,” Susan remembers. “We were in seven different sections in the Chronicle. It really touched people’s hearts.” A look back at the archives reveals Herb Caen got the scoop on the inn’s reopening in April 1985. Another wire story that ran in dozens of papers across the country celebrated chef James Moore’s California cuisine at the inn — the farm-to-table style made famous by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. The chef would spend his mornings picking herbs and fingerling potatoes in the planted terraces below the deck.
The Mountain Home Inn, 810 Panoramic Highway, Mill Valley, Calif., as seen in August 2023.
Andrew Chamings/SFGATE
Due to the success of the Mountain Home Inn, Susan and Edward went on to eventually run the Pelican Inn after Felix left.
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Following a remarkable and incredibly hard life that made the silver screen, Dengler spent his last years living in a home next to the inn on the Panoramic Highway. After being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the war hero took his own life in 2001. “Dengler could face torture, starvation and disease in a prison camp, but he wasn’t going to face this,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “35 years after his plane went down, Dengler rolled his wheelchair down the Panoramic Highway to the driveway of a fire station and shot himself. He was 62.”
Edward Cunningham died in 2022. Susan still owns the inn and lives down the hill in Mill Valley. She looks back on their time opening the Mountain Home 40 ago with fondness. “We had some struggles, but it was our baby,” she says. “It has a special place in our hearts.”
The inn still draws hikers, as it sits at the confluence of some of the most rewarding mountain trails in California. Last year, SFGATE set off up the mountainside from the parking lot near the inn to find the fabled, and well-hidden, site where on a rainy night in 1944 a military aircraft slammed into the mountain killing all aboard. We found some snarled steel and a small memorial among the gnarled madrone branches that day.
Outside of the Wednesday night local entertainment, often provided by Wolff and his guitar, the vibe at Mountain Home is one of simple solitude. Often touted as one of the most romantic getaways in the Bay Area, a night above the clouds is an alluring escape.
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While the bartender pours me a glass of local wine, I ask her if I should pay now or if it will go on the bill. “You can relax,” she says, more as a universal teaching on the mood of the establishment than the logistics of the money exchange. She told me she grew up in West Marin, traveled the world and came back. “I decided it’s the best place right here,” she says.
The Mountain Home Inn, 810 Panoramic Highway, Mill Valley, Calif., as seen in August 2023.
Andrew Chamings/SFGATE
After a delicious dinner of honey-Sriracha chicken wings followed by crispy salmon, I left Wolff and other stargazers on the deck and retreated down the spiral staircase around the wood-burning fire to find my quarters. Room 3 sits below the restaurant and above the canyon. It’s a modest, clean space with no TV, a small bathroom, and its own deck and rocking chairs, looking out over the rolling forest.
At nightfall, after the arpeggios, chattering and clinking of glasses on the restaurant deck above quieted, the warmth of that little mountain nest turned to something colder. The fog swept in, shrouding the rare moon and blanketing the mountain and all its mysteries below.
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If you are in distress, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 24 hours a day at 988, or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.
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