Most cultural traditions take decades to establish themselves. Some take centuries. The story of 4/20 took five teenagers, an abandoned cannabis crop they never found, and a meeting time that quietly changed everything.
It's one of the more unlikely origin stories in modern culture. And the more you understand it, the more it starts to feel less like a stoner holiday and more like something quietly universal — the simple, human impulse to pause, step away from the demands of the day, and give yourself a moment that belongs entirely to you.
Where It Started
In the autumn of 1971, five students at San Rafael High School in Northern California — Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz, and Mark Gravich — heard a rumor. A Coast Guard serviceman had grown a cannabis crop somewhere in the nearby Point Reyes forest, and was shipping out. He'd left a map.
The five friends, who called themselves the Waldos because they gathered at a wall outside their school, made a plan. They would meet every day at 4:20 p.m. — just after sports practice and extracurricular activities had wrapped — at the campus statue of Louis Pasteur. From there, they'd head out in search of the mythical harvest.
They never found it. But the ritual of the meeting, the code they'd created for it, and the sense of shared intention it gave their afternoons — that part stuck. "420 Louis" became "420," a private shorthand that meant something richer than its literal translation. It meant: meet me here, at this time, and let's be present together.
How It Spread
The Waldos might have remained a footnote in San Rafael social history had it not been for one connection: Dave Reddix's brother, who helped him land a job as a roadie for the Grateful Dead. The code traveled backstage and onto tour buses, weaving itself into the fabric of the Dead's sprawling, boundary-less community of followers.
By December 1990, a group of Deadheads in Oakland were handing out flyers at a concert, inviting people to "meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420-ing in Marin County at the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot." One of those flyers ended up in the hands of a reporter for High Times magazine. He published it. The term went global.
What began as five friends and a treasure map had become a cultural phenomenon — documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, referenced in legislation, recognized from San Francisco to Seoul. The Waldos saved their original letters and artifacts in a bank vault. Some things are worth preserving.
What It Became
Over the following decades, 4/20 grew into something layered and complex — part celebration, part counterculture statement, part call for reform. As cannabis laws began shifting across the United States and around the world, the date took on new meaning with each passing year: a marker of how far the conversation had come, and how far it still had to go.
Today, it sits at an interesting intersection. It is still, for many people, a moment of community — a collective acknowledgment of a plant and a culture that spent a long time in the shadows. But it has also become something quieter and more personal. Something that doesn't require a crowd or a statement or a festival to mean something.
What It Means to Us
At Highland Falls, we find ourselves drawn to the simpler version of the story.
Five teenagers who decided, in the middle of ordinary life, to carve out a specific moment in their day that was just for them. Not for productivity. Not for optimization. Not for anyone else. Just a designated pause — a meeting time with themselves and their friends — at the end of the day's obligations, before the evening took over.
That instinct is not specific to cannabis culture. It is not specific to 1971. It is one of the oldest and most human impulses there is: to stop, even briefly, and be present. To mark a moment as yours.
It's the same instinct behind a glass of wine at the end of a long week. A cup of tea in a quiet kitchen before the house wakes up. A porch chair and a slow sunset and twenty minutes where the phone stays on the table.
We built Highland Falls around exactly that instinct. Not around a high — around a pause. A conscious decision, made daily or whenever you need it, to step out of the noise and give yourself a moment of genuine ease.
The Waldos didn't know they were starting a tradition. They were just five teenagers who wanted to be somewhere peaceful at 4:20 in the afternoon, doing something that felt good, with people they trusted.
Fifty-plus years later, that feels like wisdom worth carrying forward.