Deal saves Pacific Crest Trail stretch
After five years of negotiations and fundraising, conservationists have purchased a tract of land in the mountains west of Mount Shasta surrounding a 17mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail, effectively securing public access to a scenic corridor on a hiking route that draws thousands of outdoor enthusiasts from around the world each year.
Not only does the deal cover the longest privately owned stretch of the entire 2,650mile hiking route, which extends from Mexico to Canada, but it also includes a 10,300acre property that is ecologically unique and scenically spectacular.
On Friday, the Treasury Department approved nearly $10 million in funds to complete the $15 million purchase. The deal ensures permanent protection of a logging area that could have been sold to a private interest.
“This really is the largest single public land acquisition that we’re going to see for the PCT in this generation,” said Megan Wargo, director of land protection for the Pacific Crest Trail Association, which helped arrange the deal. “Whenever these opportunities come up, we try and permanently protect the properties. But it’s rare.”
The Trinity Divide Project, as it’s called, covers 16 parcels of private land that sprawl across a 225squaremile area in the Trinity Mountains on the border of Trinity and Siskiyou counties in California’s far north.
For the past 25 years, the land was owned and logged by MichiganCalifornia Timber Co. Under a narrow easement, hikers were allowed to pass through the privately owned segments of the trail, but the surrounding alpine bowls, springfed lakes and coniferous forests were offlimits. “Now hikers will actually be able to get down into everything they can see from the trail,” Wargo said.
In 2014, when the timber company decided to divest the land, San Francisco’s Trust For Public Land, a nonprofit land protection group, stepped in to pull together the $15 million purchase price. Ten million dollars was allocated through the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal mechanism that funnels royalties from offshore oil and gas operations toward natural resource protection; the $5 million remainder came from the Wyss Foundation, a charitable group in Washington, D.C., that has helped finance public land purchases across the West.
On Friday, after the Treasury Department’s wire transfer, the land trust handed over possession of the area to the Forest Service, which manages the Pacific Crest Trail.
“The timber company could have just put this up for sale, but they recognized that selling this to another timber company wasn’t in the best public interest,” Wargo said. “I really applaud them.”
Ten percent of the PCT — about 250 miles — crosses private land, according to the trail association, and negotiating purchases can be tricky. To capture such a large chunk in a single transaction is a feat in and of itself, Wargo said. “The opportunity to work with one landowner on 17 miles of trail is unprecedented.”
But unlike much of that private land, largely concentrated in harsh Southern California desert, the swath in the Trinity Mountains is extraordinary, conservationists say. “Even people who have hiked the whole trail can instantly recall the spectacular beauty of this area,” Wargo said.
The section of trail loosely traces the ridges of a remote alpine landscape with panoramic views of some of California’s most impressive natural features. Along certain crests, hikers are eyelevel with snowcapped Mount Shasta, Mount Lassen, Castle Crags, the Trinity Alps and the Marble Mountains.
The property is replete with cedar, fir, Douglas fir and highaltitude pine trees and red serpentine rock formations. It encompasses 10 alpine lakes and swaths of surface springs that feed the headwaters of both the Trinity and Sacramento rivers.
“It makes them one of the most botanically rich landscapes in the world,” Wargo said. “You have plants here that don’t grow anywhere else on Earth.”
Wargo’s favorite is the carnivorous California pitcher plant, which roots in clusters by the thousands in rich alpine fens across the property.
Abutting the property are seven of the Forest Service’s Special Interest Areas, so designated for their scenic, geologic or botanic value. Once researchers start exploring the property, Wargo expects those special areas to expand.
Like any significant land deal in the West these days, the Trinity Divide Project carries political implications both locally and nationally.
Selling rural conservative communities on land transfers to federal agencies isn’t always easy, Wargo said, particularly in areas where environmental regulations have curtailed formerly lucrative resource extraction. Approximately 60% of the landmass in rural Siskiyou County is publicly owned, and the area was built on gold mining and logging. But tourism has come to supplant those industries, and locals have come around to support initiatives to open outdoor recreation opportunities in their backyard, said Siskiyou County Supervisor Ed Valenzuela.
“We’ve become heavily dependent on tourism, so it’s a huge positive for this community,” Valenzuela said of the Trinity Divide deal. “As we speak, you can see the uptick in hikers coming through town.”
More broadly, funding for public land projects has come under fire on Capitol Hill during the past three years. President Trump’s latest budget proposal strips funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, but members of Congress are pushing back.
There were moments in the past five years when directors at the Trust For Public Land feared the fund wouldn’t be renewed and their primary funding source would evaporate, says Guillermo Rodriguez, the trust’s California state director. If the Trinity Divide area would have hit the market, “who knows if it would have been sold and subdivided,” he said.
Directors at the trust hope that the success of the Trinity Divide Project will help persuade legislators to support similar land deals going forward.
“We used this acquisition as a bit of a poster child for those of us on the West to try to give our members of Congress more reason to support the program and illustrate the kinds of amazing landscapes that we can protect,” Rodriguez said. “Certainly, the PCT is a vital economic lifeline, and this gives us the ability to try and fully protect it.”