Five miles of coastline preserved in landmark redwoods deal

$36.9M is largest land conservation deal on NorCal coast since 1998

In the largest coastal land preservation deal in Northern California in more than 20 years, a San Francisco environmental group has signed an agreement to buy five miles of rugged oceanfront land on the Mendocino Coast, with plans to restore its redwood forests.

Home to Roosevelt elk, coho salmon, mountain lions and other wildlife, the oceanfront panorama has changed little since Spanish galleons sailed south from Cape Mendocino in the 1600s. It sits at the southern end of the “Lost Coast,” between Rockport and Ferndale, an area so steep and isolated that state road engineers in 1984 abandoned plans to extend Highway 1 through the region, turning the roadway inland and leaving the oceanfront the most undeveloped and isolated portion of California’s famed coastline.

Save the Redwoods League will pay $36.9 million for the 3,181-acre expanse, which it is calling the “Lost Coast Redwoods” property, to the Soper Company, parent of Soper Wheeler timber company, which has owned it since 1963.

“Despite the fact that there are 40 million people in California,” said Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League, “this is one of those places where you get a sense of what California was, and still could be, where nature makes the rules and there is incredible power and beauty in wildness.”

Hodder said the league plans to conduct a detailed biological survey of the property, and then build trails for eventual public access.

Second-growth redwood forests there are 80 to 100 years old, he said, with a few remaining old-growth redwoods, and some trees roughly 230 feet tall.

The last time a conservation group protected as many miles of coastline in Northern California was in 1998.

Then, Save the Redwoods League, the Trust for Public Land and other environmental groups orchestrated a $44 million deal to buy the Coast Dairies property, a 7,000acre pastoral expanse of rolling meadows with six miles of ocean frontage between Santa Cruz and Davenport. Two Swiss families that had owned it for a century. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Palo Alto provided most of the funding.

That property had been proposed for golf courses, gated subdivisions and even a nuclear power plant in the late 1960s. Former President Obama designated it as a national monument in 2017. Its beaches went to California’s state parks department, and inland areas to the Bureau of Land Management. Crews are building trails there now.

Save the Redwoods League, founded in 1918 when 2,000-year-old redwoods were being cut down for shingles, railroad ties and vineyard stakes, is one of the state’s most venerable conservation organizations. Over the past century it has preserved more than 200,000 acres of redwood forests, playing a key role in establishing or enlarging 66 state, local and national parks, including Humboldt Redwoods, Calaveras Big Trees, Big Basin, Avenue of the Giants and others.

The most recent deal, supported by an ongoing private fundraising campaign, came about because of the end of another longstanding California institution, Soper Wheeler timber company. The company, founded in 1904 and based in Nevada City, has been selling off its land holdings in recent years, said Aric Starck, executive chairman of its board.

It is owned by about 90 shareholders around the country, many of whom are direct descendants of founders James P. Soper Jr. and Nelson P. Wheeler. With California’s tough environmental rules and competition from other increasingly large timber companies, the shareholders decided it was time to move on, he said.

“It’s an opportunity for us to basically divest of these assets and allow the individual shareholders to invest how they want,” he said.

The company has sold much of its roughly 200,000 acres to Sierra Pacific and other timber companies. It is looking to sell 18,000 acres it still owns near Fort Ross on the Sonoma County coast, in Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains and in other areas, Starck said. The company marketed the Mendocino County property, which has had various levels of logging since the 1880s, as a potential windfall for a timber company or a private estate for a wealthy family interested in its deserted beaches.