A campsite tucked away in the forest, far from San Francisco’s encampments, faces similar problems – including rats, trash and what to do with human waste

Amid the towering redwoods north of San Francisco, there is a forest trail littered with clothing – T-shirts, bras, shoes. It leads to a clearing where a primitive fence made of branches encloses a tent and a jumble of dirty belongings. Toni Lynn Evans, barefoot and with the traces of purple varnish on her toenails, emerges.

“I call it the plateau, the land of the lost,” she said of the backcountry she calls home.

Dozens more tents, hidden among the trees and clinging to muddy hillsides, dot the landscape in and around the bucolic resort town of Guerneville. Some 240 people are thought to be homeless in a region with a population of about 12,000, according to the county, meaning that the per capita rate is more than 10 times the US average. They have built semi-permanent communities, clearing paths and carving steps into the slopes. They use batteries for power, propane tanks for heat and cooking.

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Would they prefer to be elsewhere? “I won’t live in a city,” Evans said. “People age faster there. If you ever look at the people down in San Francisco, a 19-year-old looks 35. Up here, you’ll see a 35-year-old look 19.” Her term for it: “the shitty city”.

Homelessness is commonly regarded as an urban ill, but less than half of the US homeless population lives in the country’s biggest cities. In tiny communities such as Guerneville and its rural surrounds, the scale of the problem can be overwhelming.

Evans, 54, has pale skin, bright blue eyes, and is missing a front tooth that was knocked out by her ex-husband. Sipping primly from a bottle of whiskey mixed with beer, she gave a tour, first of her former, rat-infested campsite near the river. “A couple little tiny ones would curl up behind me under my blankets, under my butt, to sleep,” she said. “Over there we don’t have no rats.”

After taking a few drags on a cigarette, she tapped it into an ashtray that she carried around and balanced on logs. Vanishing into the trees for a while, she reappeared with a blind dog on a leash; it did its business in the ivy, which Evans left there. She explained the lack of shoes or socks: “My feet get too hot.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Toni Lynn Evans, 54, in the woods just feet away from her tent encampment. Photograph: Gabrielle Lurie/The Guardian

Born in San Francisco, Evans used to work as a housekeeper and in restaurants and has been homeless since about 2012, after her mother died and the home they shared went into foreclosure. One day, she says, she found herself standing in the driveway surrounded by all the furnishings. Much of it was stolen: computer, stereo, a box containing her mother’s ashes.

She has had a mini-stroke and experiences memory loss. “I’m really tired. I’m more tired than I should be for my age,” she said. “I will not survive another winter, that’s for sure.”

Once a logging town, Guerneville draws visitors seeking a dose of small-town Americana. Its main street has ice cream shops, galleries and, in a mark of its progressive leanings, a prominent gay bar. The river is perfect for swimming and inner-tubing. But soaring property prices and a tight market mean that those on the bottom income rungs, as well as the unstable, are in a precarious position. Most of the homeless are said to have previously been housed in the area, their numbers relatively unchanged since the beginning of the recession.

Although some locals are angry about the state of affairs, many are generous with food and other necessities. In the winter months, the homeless can take shelter in the town veterans hall where they can make a bed for themselves on the hardwood floor. And there are plans to build a facility combining a year-round, 30-bed shelter, a medical center and services including, among other things, substance-abuse counselling and computer access – astonishing for a place that seems so out-of-the-way. But with only limited space, the project, while much-needed, is not an immediate fix.

Mark Emmett, who founded the Guerneville Community Alliance,

which has a focus on local homelessness, first visited some of the encampments last year. “You take a 20ft by 20ft area that’s full of bicycles, car batteries – it’s almost complete sensory overload, and you have people basically living in squalor,” he said. “It’s just something that you don’t see in America.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The tents of couple Nicolai Lisiukoff and Barbara Tribett. Photograph: Gabrielle Lurie/The Guardian

However confounding the situation, residents’ concerns are often practical and focused on the byproducts of lives lived in the open: plastic bags, food packaging, human waste. In 2014, a man named Chris Brokate, who runs a janitorial business, began leading cleanups. This year alone he says he has helped carry out more than 60,000 pounds of trash.

Brokate recently drove to a spot known as Cosy Cove, a steep, thin strip of hillside between the road and the river. The scattered tents are all but invisible to passing cars, deep in the shade of redwoods so lofty that their crowns cannot be discerned. A man missing many teeth named Nicolai Lisiukoff popped up, asked for some trash bags, and led Brokate back along the precarious path.

“This is our winter home,” Lisiukoff said, gesturing to some tents that were halfway down, out of the way of floods. He stopped at another perched high above the river, a few feet from the edge. Despite the netting that had been installed, one false step would mean a tumble into the current. His girlfriend, Barbara Tribett, sat on a camper chair. There was a stove, pans that they cleaned with river water, a mug rack leaning in the dirt. Mold, rats and ticks were a nuisance, they said.

“Where and what you guys do with your bathroom,” Brokate began, delicately, “let’s start talking about how we can make that situation better.”

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Tribett said she used double-bags. “Kenny’s hole was right there,” she added, referring to another resident and pointing to an indentation a few feet from their encampment.

“That’s too close to the river,” Brokate said. Not least because sunbathers on the other bank could be glimpsed through the leaves.

Lisiukoff said he was indifferent as to whether he remained living in the understory. Evans, meanwhile, hopes to escape. Sitting inside her tent, she carefully cleaned her face with wet wipes and smiled. A large butterfly flashed through the sunshine and above her tumbledown habitation. “You should come back when I got a good a day,” she said. “A hair and makeup day.”