The mountain's literary ghost is Robert Louis Stevenson. In the summer of 1880, broke and newly married, the young Scottish writer spent his honeymoon squatting in an abandoned miners' bunkhouse on the slopes of Mount St. Helena, at the played-out Silverado mine. He wrote the months up in The Silverado Squatters, and it was there, tasting the valley's young wines, that he set down the line wine country has quoted ever since — that wine is "bottled poetry." The peak and a state park on its flank both carry his memory today.
What's with Mount St. Helena? The town takes its name from the mountain that stands at the head of the valley — Mount St. Helena, a 4,340-foot peak that closes off the upper Napa Valley to the north. (It is not, despite a century of confusion, the volcano: that's Mount St. Helens, a different mountain and a different spelling, a thousand miles up in Washington.) Mount St. Helena is the quiet giant of wine country — the cool night air that slides down off it is part of what makes the grapes here what they are — and, as you'll see, it has its own literary ghost.
Why People Visit St Helena
St. Helena offers Napa Valley at its most walkable and unhurried — a real town in the middle of the vineyards, with deep wine heritage, a literary past, and the mountain overhead. Visitors come for the tasting country and the scenery and stay for the small-town stone streets and the easy pace. It is refined without being precious, and beautiful in every season.
