Don't let the name fool you, this is Yosemite's most charming lodging

North Fork, California, is not the kind of place where you'd expect to find a hostel. Sprawled across the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and surrounded by national forestland, the former logging town - home to around 3,000 people - is famous for its location at the exact geographic center of California.

It is quiet. It is rural. It leans conservative, as evidenced by the hunting trophies and firearms proudly displayed at the Buckhorn Saloon & Restaurant, its primary watering hole. A gateway town to Yosemite National Park, North Fork is situated just 30 miles south of the park's southern entrance and about a five-minute drive south of Bass Lake.

Cruise through town, and you'll pass a few shops, the bar, the hardware store and an organic grocery store. And just beyond the main drag, it's easy to miss the little red cottage set back a bit from Road 222. Look closely, though, and a small sign out front features a backpacking donkey, and in green lettering: "JACKASS HOSTEL."

And while you'll immediately have questions about the name alone, the biggest question from North Fork locals is raised by another sign out front - a for sale sign.

Inside Jackass Hostel

On a sunny day in March, the owners of Jackass Hostel are showing me around, and the place is not what I expected. Because of the name, I had assumed the hostel was connected with Johnny Knoxville's MTV reality series and would be full of drunk travelers attempting preposterous stunts. It's actually a cozy, two-story mountain retreat with one co-ed dorm, one women's dorm, one private room and two bathrooms.

Musical instruments abound. There is a world map with pins in all the places guests came in from. The walls are festooned with blown-up photographs and paintings by the owners and their friends - and there's even a tiny painting of Yosemite's Half Dome. The hostel's name, it turns out, has a literal origin.

"There's a lot of history with the jackasses that used to haul equipment around here," says Kim Lawson, who co-owns the place with her sister Heather. "So things just started getting named Jackass. There's Jackass Lake, there's Jackass Meadow."

The name offers endless amusement. Kim enjoys telling guests the lake was named after the hostel (that's not the case, she admits), and at present, Heather is wearing a tank top featuring a large donkey head and some text: "Jackass Hostel. Yes, we named our hostel after you."

Although the hostel is not a party hostel, it is an ideal spot for world travelers to swap stories and strategize about national park visits and local North Fork adventures. While you might imagine that a small Sierra town would not be welcoming to visitors from abroad, you'd be wrong. Jackass Hostel guests frequently patronize the local shops, restaurants and bars and befriend locals. Some wander over to the Vipassana Meditation Center, which holds silent retreats, while others end up at Kern Family Farm, an organic homestead that provides room and board in exchange for volunteer farmwork.

A significant percentage of the guests are there to hike, bike and rock climb, meaning they turn in early and rise early for their chosen outdoor endeavors. Over the years, the Lawsons sometimes enticed guests through Booking.com, Airbnb and other short-term rental sites, and people occasionally showed up without realizing they had booked a bed in a shared dorm. That happened once to a couple in their 60s who had never stayed in a hostel, Kim recounted.

"They were like, OK, let's try it," she said. "They were in the co-ed dorm, and they were so funny and adorable. I put some curtains up on their bed for them. And when they were leaving, they told us they actually had a really good time meeting all these people from around the world."

I asked Kim if there were any other guests with fun stories I should talk to, and she knew the exact right person.

A 'pivotal moment' at Jackass Hostel

When Wolfgang Henneberger, a then-22-year-old from Munich, Germany, showed up in North Fork, he was having issues. Henneberger's plan had been to hitchhike across the United States, Beat Generation style, having read Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."

But as it turned out, it was much harder to hail a ride in 2024 than it was in the 1950s - and seemingly not as safe. After some adventures in Yosemite, Henneberger scored a ride with a woman from North Fork, and she dropped him at the doorstep of Jackass Hostel. He didn't have much money, and he was in mid-realization that hitchhiking to Washington, D.C., where he was enrolled in a summer school program, was probably not going to happen.

"I was stranded in North Fork," Henneberger told me over the phone from Europe. It was dark out when he showed up, but upon entry, he could see that this place was different from hostels in Europe. It was the smallest and homiest one he had ever experienced.

"When you arrive there and you see the kitchen, they have all the supplies and you're welcome to use them," he said. "... I saw that they had stuff to make pancakes, and I just made pancakes at 10 p.m." At that point, Henneberger was the only guest, as the Lawsons hadn't yet opened the hostel for the season.

Kim was happy to accommodate, though, and because Henneberger was low on cash, she let him stay free of charge in exchange for helping with yard work and house tasks.

Henneberger picked clovers from the garden and made salads with ranch dressing every day, and the Lawsons took him to a bonfire party. He also attended church with the woman who had dropped him at the hostel, and the reverend invited him over for a barbecue, he remembers.

"Everybody was so open to meeting this weird German guy who thought he could hitchhike through the country," Henneberger said.

After about a week, a relative offered to let him borrow a car for his travels, and his new friends at the hostel urged him to accept. He ended up driving 20,000 miles that summer, visiting 40 states and falling in love with America. "The time at Jackass Hostel was special for me," he said, "because staying there was a pivotal moment for my plans."

How North Fork got its hostel

Nearly 15 years earlier, when Scott Marsh was purchasing 32827 Road 222 in North Fork, he had no plans to run it as a hostel. Living in San Francisco back in the early 2000s, Marsh was involved with the Pour Guys, a collective that had recently purchased the Tempest bar, and he was also running a chain of organically sourced coffee shops, with three locations in the Sierra Nevada.

Marsh, who told me the origin story of Jackass Hostel over the phone from Belize, bought the house that would later become Jackass Hostel in 2010 to help a local family member who had fallen on hard times in the 2008 recession. But the house ended up sitting empty for a few years, and Marsh decided he should turn that into a business as well. He had always loved exploring the world and staying in hostels.

"I'd been to like 30 countries before. And so the idea for Jackass Hostel was born out of my favorite places around the world, where it was more than just a bunk bed, right?" he said. "There was a community, and there was a killer kitchen, and that's where you met all the people. All the languages and cultures were being exchanged in the kitchen."

Under normal circumstances, it might have been tough for an outsider to open a hostel business in a quiet, rural town in the Sierra Nevada. But Marsh had already gone through an initiation of sorts with one of his cafes, which was located just up the road.

"When I first moved there and I opened the cafe, I s-t you not, I got death threats, death letters, they'd call and harass my employees," Marsh said. Callers would say things like, "your boss is the devil, and he needs to get out of here with his liberal ways and blah, blah, blah, we don't need healthy food here," Marsh said.

He wasn't going anywhere, though. Marsh had been in the military for eight years, done construction for three, and worked as a bartender and a brewer in San Francisco. "So by the time I got to North Fork, I wasn't just some liberal hippie opening a little cafe," he said. "I still had that other rough-and-tumble side to me, which eventually endeared me to that community, because it is a rough-and-tumble community, right? They got their grit, and they didn't care for outsiders, but it all came full circle, and we all loved each other in the end. ... By the time the hostel rolled around, everybody was rooting for me."

The rise of Jackass Hostel

There were not very many hostels in the vicinity of Yosemite National Park back then - still aren't, in fact - and none in the gateway communities nearest the park's south entrance. So almost immediately, Jackass Hostel began to draw in international visitors, and word of its excellence as a place to meet travelers and have authentic Sierra Nevada experiences began to spread.

In 2019, Jackass Hostel was sold out every night. "We had a waiting list of like three months," Marsh said. "So we just started putting up tents in the backyard. There would be like 13 people inside. There'd be like six, seven people outside. So every night was like 20 people a night in that little place. And it was just these big parties of culture, celebrating, right? Ten languages flying around. And that was all amazing."

Guests were impressed with Yosemite and other natural attractions in the region, but one of the less expected benefits of staying at Jackass Hostel was getting to know North Fork. They frequented the local businesses and were particularly taken with the Buckhorn Saloon, where people would bring their guns and smoke cigarettes indoors, and bar fights occasionally broke out over what Marsh referred to as "Sierra foothills community stuff."

"You go in there, and it's literally cowboys and Indians and hippies," Marsh said. "And then a hostel brought all these foreign travelers ... and they'd have this real, authentic, rustic experience. They loved it."

Although the hostel was thriving, Marsh was having trouble with his other businesses. Fires in Mariposa had necessitated closing two of his cafes, and on the heels of those losses, the pandemic hit. "That was the cherry on top of my s-t Sunday," he said.

He found himself in bankruptcy, and to get out of it, Marsh decided to sell the hostel and everything in it.

"Right when I put it on the market, there were five offers immediately," he said. "Heather and Kim were one of them, and they were not the smallest offer, but they were like, number three."

The decision was "a no-brainer" for Marsh, though, because "I love those girls," he said. "They actually helped me design the logo five years earlier. So it was a happy ending there. What a great situation that the hostel got to live on, and they were part of the story from the beginning."

Boom and bust in the Sierra Nevada

Those who follow national park news may be aware that as of Jan. 1, international visitors to Yosemite are now charged an additional $100 entrance fee per person. What that might mean for gateway hostels, which cater to visitors from abroad who are often on a budget, remains to be seen.

The Lawsons aren't currently hosting guests, so they aren't sure of the impact. But that uncertainty isn't the reason they've put the place up for sale. In fact, history has repeated itself, and they, like Marsh, are needing to sell the property (along with its hostel business) to make up for losses in another endeavor.

The Lawsons are serial entrepreneurs and once had a couple of e-commerce businesses, through which they sold hand-printed, fair-trade shirts and adult-themed candles. During the pandemic, those businesses were "crushing it," Kim said, as Vons picked up their T-shirts, and people confined to their homes were apparently very interested in candles with scents like "Irish Morning Wood" and "Horney Honeysuckle" and labels that read "Light when you want me naked."

Post-pandemic, though, shipping costs more than doubled, but the Lawson sisters had already stocked up on inventory. Today, they have about a thousand candles in the hostel basement, with no way to make a profit on them. They stopped shipping candles completely last summer, and to cover their losses, they decided to put Jackass Hostel up for sale this year. They're asking $339,000.

"Selling this house gets us even again," Heather said. "And we can start over without having that debt."

For some North Fork locals, there's concern over who might step in and what direction they might take the hostel.

"I think that our town can use as much life as possible," said Becky Kern, a co-owner of the Kern Family Farm and its organic grocery store, the Gnarly Carrot. "But I would be a little nervous about someone coming in that doesn't understand the small-town feel and, you know, wants to just turn it into something crazy."

Kern has appreciated that over the years, the Lawsons have purchased the store's fruit to stock the hostel and have sent guests to shop there. In general, Kern said, she supports anything that draws respectful tourists to come appreciate the beauty of the area and the community.

So she's glad that the Lawsons aren't running a fire sale. As they wait for the right buyer, Kim has taken a job as the director of communications at the Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau. And together, she and Heather are working on a new business they aren't ready to talk about.

"We're willing to hang on a little bit longer for someone to come in that actually wants to keep running the hostel," Kim said. "Because it's really good for the community."

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 10:54 AM.