For fourteen days in September 1976, a wall of white fabric ran twenty-four and a half miles across the hills of Sonoma and Marin counties, rising eighteen feet high through sheep pasture and vineyard rows before it dropped over a bluff and disappeared into the Pacific. Then it came down, exactly as planned, and by the first week of October there was nothing left but fence posts pulled from the ground and a story that Sonoma County has been telling itself for fifty years.
This September, the county is telling it again, in public, on purpose. The Museum of Sonoma County in downtown Santa Rosa has a full exhibition running through November 8, a reunion event on September 12, a documentary screening later in the month, and a road race timed to fall within the fence's fiftieth anniversary window. If you have lived here long enough to hear someone gesture at a hillside off Highway 116 and say "that's where the fence ran," this is the month all of that gets explained properly. If you moved here more recently and have only caught the reference secondhand, this is worth an hour of your time before the exhibition closes.
The part of the story most people skip is the one that actually explains why locals still bring it up. It was not really a story about art winning people over. It was a story about a county saying yes to something the state said no to, and getting away with it.
Eighteen Hearings Before a Single Post Went in the Ground
Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not simply show up with fabric and stakes. Building Running Fence required agreement from 59 separate property owners whose ranchland the fence would cross, and it required the first Environmental Impact Report ever written for a work of art. County records from the process show 18 public hearings before construction could begin, the kind of regulatory process usually reserved for a highway interchange or a dam, applied instead to something that would be dismantled within a month of going up.
Getting ranchers to say yes was its own project. One of the more memorable moments of the hearings came from a Sonoma County rancher named Ed Pozzi, who spoke in favor of letting the fence cross his land at a Board of Supervisors hearing, arguing for a piece of art that offered him nothing durable in return. Multiply that conversation by 59 landowners and you start to understand why the planning stretched across roughly four years before a single post went into the ground.
When the State Said No and the County Had Already Said Yes
The twist that makes the story worth retelling is what happened at the coastline. Sonoma and Marin counties had already approved the project. The California Coastal Commission had not, and refused to grant the final permit needed to let the fence run into the ocean as designed. Christo and Jeanne-Claude built it anyway, completing the final stretch in defiance of the Commission's ruling and, according to accounts from the time, dodging state officials near the coast to finish the installation before anyone could stop them.
No one was fined into oblivion over it. No one tore it down early. The fence stood its full two weeks, came down on schedule, and the confrontation with the Coastal Commission became part of the local telling rather than a footnote that embarrassed anyone. Longtime Press Democrat columnist Gaye LeBaron, reflecting on the anniversary, put it simply:
"It's a happy story and they don't come along everyday."
That combination, a county-level yes strong enough to outlast a state-level no, is the part of the Running Fence story that outsiders tend to miss and locals tend to remember. It is folklore about how decisions actually get made here, dressed up as an art history footnote.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Month
The anniversary programming is concrete and dated, not a vague seasonal nod. Here is what's on the books:
- Through November 8 — "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Running Fence at 50 Years," the Museum of Sonoma County's full exhibition at 425 Seventh Street in Santa Rosa, built around original construction materials, artworks on loan from the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, and firsthand accounts from people who worked on the project.
- September 12 — A reunion and anniversary celebration at the museum, bringing back people connected to the original build to mark the fence's fiftieth anniversary.
- September 12 — The Running Fence Run, a 5K and 10K starting in Bloomfield that deliberately pairs the fence's fiftieth anniversary with the 2,516th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon, the run that gave the modern marathon its name and distance.
- September 26 — A screening of the Maysles brothers' 1977 documentary on the project, held at the Charles M. Schulz Museum.
Museum Executive Director Karen Wise framed the timing plainly, saying the exhibition exists "to share this remarkable story of perseverance and beauty with a new generation." That line is doing real work. A meaningful share of Sonoma County's current population was not born yet in September 1976, and for them this is not nostalgia, it is orientation.
Why This Still Matters If You Weren't Here in 1976
The county's own tourism and business groups now describe Running Fence as the moment Sonoma shifted from a straightforwardly agricultural county into one recognized as a home for art alongside agriculture, and the route itself has not been forgotten in any bureaucratic sense either. Sonoma County Ag and Open Space still keeps a mapped record of the fence's full original trajectory, meaning the ranchland Ed Pozzi and 58 of his neighbors agreed to open up in 1976 is still identifiable, parcel by parcel, five decades later.
That durability is worth sitting with. Most public art disappears from memory as fast as it disappears from the ground. This one didn't, because the mechanism behind it, a county full of ranchers, county officials, and two stubborn artists agreeing on something the state initially refused, became a story the county kept telling about itself. Christo, who had fled communist Bulgaria in 1957 before eventually building the fence with Jeanne-Claude, later called the project a scream of freedom. Fifty years later, that's not a bad description of a place that still tends to make its own decisions first and square them with everyone else after.
If you're new to Sonoma County, this is one of the better ways to spend a September weekend here, and it's the kind of local context that makes the difference between visiting a place and actually understanding it. The Elite Club, Carmen and Peter Gray's team based in Yountville, works across Napa, Sonoma, and the surrounding counties with exactly that kind of ground-level familiarity, whether the conversation is about a property, a business, or simply understanding what makes a particular corner of wine country tick. If you'd like to talk with someone who knows this region at that level, reach out to request a private consultation.
