Bohemian Grove: Inside the Secret Summer Camp of America's Most Powerful Men

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Collage of early Bohemian Grove photos showing Porter Garnett, George Sterling and Jack London outside a tent and members dining in a spiral among the redwoods, over a vintage illustrated map of the Grove

Every July, a few thousand of the richest and best connected men in America drive up a winding road in Sonoma County, flash their passes at the gate and disappear into 2,700 acres of ancient redwoods. For the next two weeks they drink, put on plays in which men play every part, wee against trees, listen to off-the-record speeches from cabinet secretaries and, on the first night, watch hooded figures burn an effigy in front of a 40ft owl.

This is Bohemian Grove. Presidents have slept here. The atomic bomb was talked about here. Richard Nixon called it the place his road to the White House began, then trashed it in private on his own secret tapes. Conspiracy theorists say it's where the world's real rulers meet to worship a pagan god. Members say it's just a camping trip with good wine. The truth is weirder and more interesting than either side lets on.

Quick Answers

What's Bohemian Grove? A private 2,700-acre redwood campground at Monte Rio, California, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, owned by the men-only Bohemian Club.
When was it founded? The Bohemian Club started in 1872. Members first camped among the Monte Rio redwoods in 1878 and later bought the land outright.
What happens there? A two-week encampment every July with plays, music, heavy drinking, lakeside talks by powerful speakers and the opening Cremation of Care ritual.
Who goes? Business leaders, politicians, military figures, entertainers and academics. Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Henry Kissinger have all been linked to it.
Can women go? Women can't be members and aren't allowed at the July encampment as members or overnight guests.
How much does it cost? Joining is reported to cost around $25,000 plus annual dues. Membership is strictly by invitation.

From Hard-Drinking Journalists to Captains of Industry

The Bohemian Club didn't start out as a playground for the powerful. It was founded in 1872 by a group of San Francisco newspapermen who liked to think of themselves as free spirited artistic types. The Bold Italic's history of the club traces its beginnings to the offices of the San Francisco Examiner, then a rented room on Sacramento Street, before the members moved into the clubhouse that still stands at Post and Taylor in Lower Nob Hill.

Rows of pointed canvas tents pitched among giant redwood trees at Bohemian Grove in 1906 — Members' tents among the redwoods in 1906, long before the Grove's camps turned into permanent lodges.

Early members and visitors included writers like Mark Twain and Jack London. But journalists and painters don't tend to have much money, and the club soon worked out that wealthy businessmen made very useful members. They paid the bills, and in return they got to rub shoulders with the city's creative crowd. It didn't take long for the money to swamp the art.

When Oscar Wilde passed through San Francisco on his 1882 American tour, he's supposed to have joked that he'd never seen so many well-fed, well-dressed, businesslike bohemians in his life. Whether he actually said it or not, the line stuck because it was true.

In 1878 the members held their first summer party in the redwoods near Monte Rio on the Russian River. Back then it was called the Midsummer High Jinks. The club eventually bought the land and kept adding to it until it grew into the 2,700-acre estate you'll find today, hidden among redwoods, some of which were already old when the Romans were in Britain.

Weaving Spiders Come Not Here: The Club's Golden Rule

The club's motto comes from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Weaving spiders, come not here." In the play it's a line from a lullaby sung to keep creepy crawlies away from the sleeping fairy queen. For the Bohemians it means something else entirely. Leave your business at the gate. No deal-making, no networking, no shop talk.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice the Grove has always been one of the best networking opportunities on earth, and everybody knows it. When you stick the heads of oil firms, defence contractors, banks and the government in the same woods for a fortnight and fill them with drink, they're going to talk. The motto is less a rule than a polite fiction that lets everyone pretend nothing serious ever happens there.

Hundreds of men in jackets seated at long outdoor dining tables beneath the redwoods at Bohemian Grove — Dinner under the redwoods. During the encampment hundreds of members eat together in the open air.

The club's emblem is the owl, a symbol of wisdom and a nod to the members' habit of staying up all night. It's been the club's symbol since the early days and an owl is carved into the clubhouse in San Francisco. Keep that owl in mind, because it's about to get a lot bigger.

The Cremation of Care: The Grove's Strangest Ritual

The encampment opens with a ceremony that's done more than anything else to make Bohemian Grove infamous. It's called the Cremation of Care, and it's been performed in roughly its current form since the 1920s, with roots going back to the club's earliest summers.

Here's how it goes. After dark, members gather at the edge of the Grove's lake in front of a giant concrete and stone owl, about 40ft tall. Robed and hooded figures carry torches. A small boat glides across the water with a ferryman, who hands over an effigy of a body to a high priest. The effigy represents Dull Care, all the worries and responsibilities the members have brought with them from the outside world. It's placed on an altar at the owl's feet and set alight, while music plays and fireworks go off.

Robed figures standing on stone steps as a fire burns at the foot of the giant stone owl during the Cremation of Care at Bohemian Grove — The Cremation of Care, with Dull Care going up in flames at the feet of the Grove's 40ft owl.

Over the years the owl has even had a voice. Recorded narration plays during the ceremony, and The Bold Italic reports that the newsreader Walter Cronkite, himself a member, once voiced the owl.

To members it's theatre. A bit of over-the-top pageantry that tells everyone the holiday has started and the stresses of being in charge of the world can be left behind for a couple of weeks. To outsiders who've seen the grainy footage, it looks a lot like a group of rich old men in robes holding a mock human sacrifice in front of a pagan idol. You can see why it's caused problems.

Pagans, Druids and Christianity

The Grove's taste for this kind of thing goes back a long way. One of the early summer plays was the 1893 Druid Jinks by Joseph D. Redding, which showed Christianity triumphing over paganism. Early photographs from Grove ceremonies, including a staged scene from 1909, still circulate online today as supposed proof of something sinister, although they come from theatrical productions rather than anything real.

High Jinks, Low Jinks and Men in Dresses

Once Care has been cremated, the real business of the Grove begins, which mostly means plays and parties. The biggest production is the Grove Play, staged on the middle weekend of the encampment on a huge outdoor stage built into a hillside. It's an original work written and composed by members, with elaborate sets, lighting, costumes and an orchestra. It can take a year to put together.

Older men in suits sitting on chairs outside a Bohemian Grove camp hung with paper lanterns — Members taking it easy outside one of the camps, strung with paper lanterns.

Then there's the Low Jinks, the comic show, which tends to be bawdier and sillier. Because no women are allowed, men play all the female parts, which puts the Grove in a long tradition of all-male clubs and colleges dressing up for the stage. The sight of a retired chief executive in a frock might be the closest thing the Grove has to a genuine secret.

On top of that there are concerts, art exhibitions, talks, shooting, canoeing on the Russian River and an awful lot of drinking. When former California governor Pat Brown, a Democrat who was a regular, was asked about the Grove by the Associated Press in 1987, he said members "talk and drink and tell dirty stories". That's probably the most honest summary anyone's ever given.

The Camps: Mandalay, Cave Man, Owl's Nest and Hill Billies

The Grove isn't one big campsite. It's split into more than 100 smaller camps, each with its own name, its own clubhouse and its own personality. Members belong to a camp, and the camp you're in says a lot about where you sit in the pecking order.

Some of the best known include:

Mandalay, long seen as the most exclusive of the lot, with links to Henry Kissinger and the Bechtel family
Cave Man, the camp of Herbert Hoover and later Richard Nixon
Owl's Nest, associated with Ronald Reagan
Hill Billies, the camp of the Bush family

The camps range from rustic cabins to proper lodges with their own chefs and bars. In the early 1990s, John Taylor of the Nixon Library spent a night at Cave Man as an aide to the former president, and a photo from that trip shows Nixon alongside AIG boss Hank Greenberg, former US attorney general Ed Meese, Archer Daniels Midland chief Dwayne Andreas and Herbert Hoover's grandson. That's a fairly typical Grove campfire.

Illustrated pictorial map of Bohemian Grove showing its camps, paths and buildings among the redwoods — A large map can be viewed here

Who Are the Members?

The club has around 2,500 members by most estimates, and the guest list at the summer encampment reads like a who's who of American power. Membership lists are private, but enough has leaked over the decades to paint a clear picture.

Most of the Republican presidents of the 20th century have been members or guests, starting with Herbert Hoover, who was a devoted Bohemian. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were all regulars. George W. Bush has attended as a guest. Henry Kissinger was a member, and other guests have included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Clint Eastwood. Donald Trump, interestingly, isn't thought to have ever been invited.

Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon seated with other members at a table at Owl's Nest camp, Bohemian Grove, in summer 1967 — Owl's Nest camp, summer 1967. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon sit among the members, with atomic scientist Glenn Seaborg and oilman Edwin Pauley also in the group.

It isn't only Republicans or politicians. Business leaders have included the Rockefellers, William Randolph Hearst and the Koch brothers, along with heads of banks, oil firms, engineering giants and media companies. Entertainers, scientists and university presidents make up the numbers. Truthdig's reporting on the club also notes that the billionaire Harlan Crow brought Justice Clarence Thomas along, and that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reportedly spoke at the 2023 retreat.

How Do You Get In?

You don't apply. There's no website, no public email address and no form to fill in. You have to be invited, and you need existing members to vouch for you. In 1989 Spy magazine reported a waiting list of 33 years, which means some people put forward in their 30s would be pensioners by the time they got through the gate. Joining is reported to cost around $25,000, with annual dues on top.

The club has a quirky way around its own rules. Because it was set up for artists, it lets in talented musicians, actors and writers as cheaper associate members. These are the people who make the plays and concerts happen, and they're the reason the Grove can still claim to be a bohemian club with a straight face.

A crowd of costumed Bohemian Club members gathered at night around a figure laid on a bier during a Grove ceremony in 1909 — A night-time Grove ceremony in 1909. Old staged photos like this still do the rounds online as 'proof' of something sinister.

The Lakeside Talks: Where the Real Business Happens

Every day at lunchtime during the encampment, members gather by the lake for a Lakeside Talk. The speakers are carefully chosen: secretaries of state, defence chiefs, central bankers, tech bosses, generals and politicians on the way up. The talks are strictly off the record, which is exactly what makes them valuable.

The most famous Lakeside Talk of all came on 29 July 1967, when Richard Nixon, then a has-been who'd lost the presidency in 1960 and the California governorship in 1962, got up to speak on foreign policy. It went down a storm. Nixon later wrote in his memoirs that the speech marked the first milestone on his road to the White House, and his 1968 campaign gathered pace from there. A photo from that summer shows him standing alongside California's new governor, Ronald Reagan.

It's this kind of thing that makes critics uneasy. If a man can effectively launch a presidential bid at a private party with no press, no record and no women, then the Grove isn't really just a holiday camp.

Nixon's Secret Tapes and the Grove

For all his gratitude about 1967, Nixon wasn't a fan of everything the Grove stood for. On a 1971 White House recording he launched into a crude, homophobic rant about San Francisco's upper class, the Bohemian crowd and the gay men he associated with them. The remarks were released later than most of the tapes and first appeared in Harper's Magazine in 2000, then resurfaced in 2017 when John A. Farrell's biography Richard Nixon: The Life came out.

It's a strange glimpse behind the curtain. One of the Grove's most famous members, in private, sneering at the place that helped make him president.

Bohemian Club members in hats and suits sitting on wooden chairs in a shady redwood clearing in 1906 — Members lounging in the shade at the Grove in 1906.

The Manhattan Project Meeting

The most serious claim about the Grove is also one of the best documented. In 1942, with America racing to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany, the physicist Ernest Lawrence took a group of scientists and army officers up to Bohemian Grove to talk through the project.

Accounts differ on exactly who was there. In an oral history for the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Project engineer Harold Fidler recalled that Lawrence brought Colonel Kenneth Nichols to the Grove, along with Lyman Briggs and, he believed, Enrico Fermi. Later retellings often add J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves to the guest list, usually dating the gathering to September 1942.

Fidler's version has a lovely bit of detail. Lawrence used the trip to lobby for a bomb plant at Redding in northern California, near the newly built Shasta Dam, which could supply the enormous amount of electricity the work needed. He lost. The planners felt California was too close to the coast and too exposed, and the giant uranium plant went to Oak Ridge in Tennessee instead, where the Tennessee Valley Authority had power to spare. The project's later bomb-building work ended up in the New Mexico desert, which you can read more about in our piece on a summer dance camp in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

For the Grove's critics, the meeting proves their point. Whatever the motto says, decisions that shaped the whole planet have been talked over in those woods.

Three men seated on tree-stump stools beneath a huge Japanese-style parasol and paper lanterns at a Bohemian Grove camp in 1907 — One of the more elaborate camps in 1907, complete with a giant parasol and paper lanterns.

Getting Inside: Journalists, Infiltrators and Alex Jones

Outsiders have spent decades trying to get a look behind the gate. In 1981 Mother Jones published a piece by Rick Clogher, who'd got inside during both weekends of the encampment with help from local activists. It brought the Grove international attention for the first time.

Then in November 1989 came the article that most people still remember. Spy magazine sent the journalist Philip Weiss to the Grove, and his piece, Masters of the Universe Go to Camp, was billed as the first time anyone had properly infiltrated the place. He described piano music drifting through the woods and men casually relieving themselves against the trees. Grove lore even has a particular redwood that gets more attention than the rest, nicknamed the pissing tree.

Seven men in hats and outdoor clothes sitting on a long wooden bench in front of a redwood at Bohemian Grove in 1908 — A group of members at the Grove in 1908.

In July 2000 the conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones sneaked in with a hidden camera and the British writer Jon Ronson in tow. Jones filmed the Cremation of Care and released it as a documentary, convinced he'd caught the global elite in an occult ritual. Ronson, who wrote about the trip in his book Them, came away with a rather different impression. What he saw was less a satanic cabal and more a lot of elderly men acting like overgrown schoolboys, giving off what he called an all-pervading sense of immaturity.

Jones's footage turned the Grove into a fixture of conspiracy culture. Today you'll find claims online that the owl represents the ancient god Moloch and that the burning effigy is a real child sacrifice. There's no evidence for any of it. The effigy is a prop, and the owl is the club's own emblem that's been around since the 1870s. But the secrecy means the theories never go away.

The Controversies: Women, Wages and Protest

Keeping Women Out

The Grove's men-only rule has caused rows for decades. Women can't be members, and while some are now allowed in as daytime guests at certain times, they have to be out by 10pm. For a long time the club wouldn't even let women work at the Grove during the encampment. That changed after a sex discrimination case brought under California employment law in the late 1970s, a case the club fought and lost in the courts in the 1980s.

In 2019 the row reached Sonoma County's Board of Supervisors. For 14 years the county had signed off a security contract worth about $151,000 for sheriff's deputies to guard the Grove entrance without anyone batting an eyelid. Then supervisor Shirlee Zane asked how taxpayers could fund services for a club that bans women, backed by Lynda Hopkins, the first woman to represent the district that includes the Grove. The county's lawyers were asked to look into it, while Sheriff Mark Essick insisted that guarding the place wasn't the same as endorsing it.

Men watching a staged scene in the redwoods in 1906, with a man lying on the ground between candles and a robed figure kneeling beside him — A theatrical performance at the Grove in 1906, with an all-male cast and an all-male audience.

The Valets' Lawsuit

Behind the scenes the Grove relies on hundreds of staff, from cooks and cleaners to the valets who look after members in the camps. In June 2023 three former valets filed a class action claiming they'd worked 15 to 18 hour days without proper breaks, been paid for only eight hours and been banned from accepting tips. The suit sought $1.5 million on behalf of roughly 300 valets. The club denied the claims and said it'd defend itself vigorously. A similar wage case in 2016 had ended with the club paying out $7 million.

Fifty Years of Protest

The protests started in 1980, when activist Mary Moore and fellow campaigners against the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant realised that many of the people profiting from the nuclear industry spent their summers at the Grove. Their group, which became the Bohemian Grove Action Network, organised years of demonstrations, some of them big and rowdy enough to have sheriff's deputies lining the road. A former Grove employee, nicknamed Deep Throat, fed them membership lists and details of the Lakeside Talks until his death from AIDS.

The protests are smaller now, but they haven't stopped. In July 2026 around 50 people gathered near the Grove for a counter-ritual called the Resurrection of Care, organised by the local chapter of CODE PINK. Mary Moore was there, having just turned 91, still turning up to the gates she first picketed more than four decades earlier.

The Trees Themselves

There's one more controversy that gets less attention. For a club that celebrates its ancient redwoods, the Bohemian Club has also logged its own land. In 2009 it reportedly won state approval to harvest up to 1.7 million board feet of timber a year for a century, which went down about as well with local environmentalists as you'd expect.

So What Really Goes On at Bohemian Grove?

Strip away the conspiracy theories and you're left with something that's somehow both more ordinary and more troubling. Bohemian Grove is a very expensive summer camp where powerful old men dress up, drink too much, sing, wee on trees and put on plays about druids. It's also a place where presidents, defence chiefs, bankers and billionaires spend two weeks together, completely out of sight, listening to private briefings and forming friendships that last a lifetime.

Nobody's sacrificing children to an owl. But when a meeting in the woods can help decide where to build the atom bomb, or kick-start a presidential campaign, the people who aren't invited are entitled to ask what else gets said under those redwoods. As long as the gate stays shut, they'll keep asking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where exactly is Bohemian Grove?

It's at 20601 Bohemian Avenue in Monte Rio, Sonoma County, on the Russian River, around a two-hour drive north of San Francisco. The site is private and guarded, so you can't visit, although the surrounding area is popular with tourists and there are public redwood parks nearby.

Has Donald Trump been to Bohemian Grove?

There's no record of Trump ever attending or being invited, which makes him unusual among modern Republican presidents. His brash New York style has never been a natural fit with the old-money West Coast club.

Is the Bohemian Club a secret society?

Not in the strict sense. It's a registered private club with a public address in San Francisco, and its existence has never been a secret. What's private is its membership list and what's said at the Grove, which is why it's often lumped in with secret societies.