Wyntoon: The Hearst Nobody Visits

Most people know about Hearst Castle. The hilltop palace at San Simeon, the Neptune Pool, the Greco-Roman statues, the guest wing where Hollywood celebrities slept.

William Randolph Hearst had another property.

On the McCloud River, in the shadow of Mount Shasta, Hearst owned a cluster of buildings designed by Julia Morgan, the same architect who built San Simeon. But Wyntoon was not Moorish or Mediterranean. Morgan rebuilt it after a fire in nineteen thirty as a Bavarian village, stone buildings in the Palatinate style clustered along a mountain river, decorated inside with fairy-tale murals attributed to the illustrator Willy Pogany. It looked like something from a German folktale, dropped into the Cascade Mountains.

Hearst used Wyntoon as a retreat from San Simeon's social obligations. Then in nineteen forty-two, with the Pacific coast under defense restrictions, he moved his operation to Wyntoon more or less full-time. The newspapers he controlled, the political positions he pushed, the directives to editors across the country, all of this continued from a Bavarian fantasy on a mountain river in far northern California.

Wyntoon is private property. It is closed to the public. It does not appear in most California travel narratives. It exists behind a gate on the McCloud River and has no visitors.

The Hearst Castle has a parking lot and a gift shop. Wyntoon has the river and the trees, and neither of them are telling.

A note: the Willy Pogany mural attribution is cited in secondary sources but has not been verified against primary documents in this research. Treat it as probable, not confirmed.