Anderson Gulch is a small watershed on the Lost Coast of Northern California, within the Sinkyone Wilderness, between Northport Gulch and Dark Gulch, about 9 miles (15 km) west of Leggett and 2.6 miles (4 km) south-southeast of Wheeler, California. Anderson Gulch, the Anderson Cliffs and the former community of Andersonia were all named for sawmill owner Henry N. Anderson. The coastal rocks here belong mostly to the Franciscan Complex, a belt of sandstone, shale and minor conglomerate that formed from the Late Jurassic through the Cretaceous, roughly 150 to 66 million years ago, and has since undergone low-grade metamorphism.

Native American artifacts found in the King Range suggest the area was first settled by the Wiyot, then the Yurok, by AD 1100; more recently the Mattole, Sinkyone and Bear River peoples have lived here. Spanish, American and Russian explorers and fur trappers arrived from the 1570s to the 1800s. Early European settlers harvested bark from tanoak trees to tan hides into leather, and bark collectors formed the small community of Kenny around springs at the headwaters of the North Fork of Usal Creek. A wharf was built at Bear Harbor in 1884 to load bark onto ships, and the Bear Harbor and Eel River Railroad was incorporated in 1896 to connect the wharf to a sawmill being built on the South Fork Eel River at Andersonia. Henry Anderson was killed in a construction accident in 1905, and both the sawmill and the railroad languished after his death; the facilities were dismantled in 1921.

The Lost Coast is a largely undeveloped stretch of the California North Coast in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, encompassing the King Range. It earned its name after the area was depopulated in the 1930s, and the steep, geotechnically difficult coastal mountains made building a state highway or county road too costly, leaving it the most undeveloped, remote section of the California coastline. California began acquiring land here in 1975 to establish Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, named for the native Sinkyone people. In January 2017 President Barack Obama used the Antiquities Act to add the 440-acre (180 ha) Lost Coast Headlands, along with four other sites, to the California Coastal National Monument. The South Lost Coast Trail crosses Anderson Gulch about 0.27 miles (0.4 km) from the beach on its 22-mile (35 km) route from Usal Creek in the south to Needle Rock in the north; because the shoreline is steep and rocky, the trail rises and dips through the foothills rather than following the beach, passing backcountry camps, including one near the Anderson Gulch crossing.  Read more here and here. Explore more of Anderson Gulch and the Lost Coast here: