From Dirt Biking to ATV Trails: GoPro Founder Nick Woodman’s $20 Million California Ranch Offers 150 Acres of Adventure
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You’d want one of Nick Woodman’s GoPro cameras to capture the action on the miles of hiking, dirt-biking and ATV trails at his 150-acre California ranch.
Woodman, 45, who founded GoPro in 2002 and built it into a billion-dollar company, is now looking to sell the property he dubbed Boogie Ranch, in the hills just north of Santa Cruz.
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In 2014 Woodman paid $13.7 million for the sprawling estate with its five-bedroom main house, two guest cottages, toy barn, tractor barn, pool and bocce court. Now he’s asked Michael Dreyfus of Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty to find a buyer with $20 million to spare.
Seems the GoPro founder is now living full-time in Montana where he and his family own a home at the tony Yellowstone Club in Big Sky. It’s either there, or aboard his gorgeous 180-foot Dutch-built superyacht Driftwood that, when he’s not using it, charters for $275,000 a week.
As part of his apparent move out of California, in February Woodman off-loaded his 8,000-square-foot, Tuscan-style home on a three-acre lot in Woodside, not far from Boogie Ranch and GoPro’s San Mateo headquarters, for $18.4 million.
Now it’s time for the ranch to go. It reportedly got its nickname for the way the adventure-focused estate encourages visitors to “boogie down” and get active. That could include hiking on one of the many trails Woodman created after buying the property or using one of the multitude of dirt bikes or ATVs parked in the “toy” barn.
The estate also offers rock faces to climb, a bocce court, a large pool to swim in as well as opportunities to tend vegetables in the estate’s organic-produce gardens.
The metal-roofed main house has five bedrooms, three full bathrooms and two half-baths, along with stunning wood-floored living and family rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows providing jaw-dropping views west to the Pacific.
The open-plan kitchen and dining room also features glass doors; these open on to a huge patio with steps leading down to the newly renovated pool.
The second-floor, pitched-ceiling master suite has its own wall of glass with views to the west and a door leading to a glass-sided balcony for catching the best of the sunsets.
On the first floor there’s also a media room, a kids’ bunk room and more bedrooms. Close by is a two-car detached garage and office. And when friends and family come to stay, there’s a three-bedroom guesthouse on the grounds along with the quaint, one-bed Orchard Cottage.
The Woodman family’s love of sustainability shows in the home’s chicken coop, the abundant vegetable and flower gardens, the lemon and avocado trees and the array of solar panels on the roof of the main home.
Listing agent Michael Dreyfus says the GoPro founder bought the ranch partly because of its positioning in a sort of microclimate, set back and elevated from the coastline. That means less fog, clearer skies and higher temperatures than much of the surrounding area.
As for GoPro, the story goes that Woodman launched the business in 2002 after a surfing trip to Australia and Indonesia. Frustrated at not being able to capture close-up shots of his surfing action, he designed a belt that could attach a waterproof camera to the body. It evolved into today’s cube-like digital GoPro.
In 2014 he took GoPro public, resulting in him becoming the highest-earning US chief executive, paying himself a reported $235 million. The following year, he joined Forbes‘ list of billionaires with an estimated fortune of $1.75 billion.
Since then, GoPro’s star hasn’t shone quite so brightly. An attempt to enter the booming drone market ended in 2018 when the GoPro Karma drone was discontinued. That prompted Woodman to return to focusing solely on his GoPro Hero digital action cameras.
His latest initiative is to offer software that lets the GoPro Hero8 be used as a webcam.
Check out more photos of the property below:
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