Canyon Ranch Woodside

Canyon Ranch Woodside: First In

It’s easy enough to drive past Canyon Ranch’s new Northern California wellness retreat, located in Woodside between the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay. With your windows down to better glimpse the colossal redwoods and gulp in the fir-saturated air, blaring something from Neil Young’s Harvest, maybe Heart of Gold or Old Man (Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch is down the road), you really are likely to miss that hard right of an exit and just keep on coasting along the serpentine Skyline Boulevard that curves through the forested Santa Cruz Mountains. You’ll realize your mistake at some point, but it’s hard to get stressed out driving through one of the most magical, mystical stretches of the state en route to a wellness retreat. If the majority of spas these days want to dramatically change your life, after spending a weekend at Woodside, I came to the conclusion that this one just wants you to get yours back. It’s a simple yet profound, distinctly fitting mission for a wellness retreat located mid-point between tech-centric San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where brutal work weeks and borderline-umbilical attachment to devices are the norm. Surrounded by towering evergreens and twisted Coast Live Oaks, the Woodside property feels more like a Renaissance Fair location than a place for overworked tech execs to recharge. But the latter (along with anyone with limited days off and a need to reboot) is who Canyon Ranch, the brand that pioneered the concept of the modern health resort in America when it opened in Tucson, Arizona, in 1979, seems to be targeting. Instead of sticking with the resort model of its Tucson and Lenox, Massachusetts, properties (each sleeps over 200 and guests often stay for a week), Canyon Ranch positioned Woodside as a retreat. What this means is shorter stays—a weekend or three days—and a smaller, more intimate property. There are certainly big-name California retreats that take more niche and hardcore approaches to wellness—Big Sur’s Esalen for things like re-wilding and couples’ tantric dance or The Ranch Malibu for a no-option philosophy, eight hours of exercise, and body-fat monitoring. And if Canyon Ranch’s other properties feel result-oriented (lose weight, deal with a medical concern, tweak eating habits), Woodside seems more about letting go of rigid goals and perhaps, at least for a few days, cutting yourself a little slack. For starters, nothing is obligatory, although there are no shades on the windows, which makes a sunrise wakeup pretty much mandatory. You can do as much or as little of the programming as you like, and, not to sound too pat, but you’ll get out of it what you put in.

Originally published by CN Traveller