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Environmentalists are joining forces with loggers in an $11.7 million deal to preserve two large redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Together, the forests cover 937 acres, an area the size of 710 football fields.
The transaction is the largest of its kind in the region in nearly a decade. Under it, the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a non-profit group based in Palo Alto, will pay $3.5 million to purchase mature redwood groves along the San Mateo-Santa Cruz County line at Gazos Creek from Big Creek Lumber, a family-run timber company in Davenport, north of Santa Cruz.
The 320-acre property sits adjacent to Butano State Park. Loggers haven’t touched it for 70 years. It contains clear-running streams with endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout. The land trust hopes to add it to Butano State Park in the coming years.
The trust is also paying $8.2 million to buy 617 acres in the Aptos hills, between the Santa Clara-Santa Cruz county line and Corralitos, from the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. The land has been logged regularly over the past century, but still contains redwoods more than 100 feet tall.
In an unusual twist, however, that property won’t become a park. The land trust is transferring ownership of the parcel, known as Valencia Creek Redwoods, to Big Creek Lumber, which will continue to log it under an agreement that sets stricter environmental limits than the company would otherwise face under existing state and local logging laws.
The deal is part of a growing trend in California for some environmental groups to work more regularly with logging companies to preserve land from development and to restore forests that were degraded generations ago after clear-cutting and other heavy logging practices.
“It’s a win-win arrangement that benefits the forest and shows just how far conservationists and timber companies have come,” said Walter Moore, the president of the land trust, known as POST.
Cal Poly plans to use the proceeds from the sale of Valencia Creek to fund an education center on another property it owns, the 3,200-acre Swanton Pacific Ranch near Davenport, along Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz. Cal Poly students studying agriculture, forestry and other resource issues take classes there and learn by working the landscape. Both Valencia Creek and Swanton Pacific Ranch were donated to the university by Al Smith, former president of Orchard Supply Hardware and former mayor of Los Gatos, who died in 1993.
Loggers and environmental groups haven’t traditionally agreed on many issues. But increasingly, they share a common goal. They’d rather have land remain as forest than be bought by developers and converted to ranchettes or trophy homes.
“There’s kind of a new paradigm shift. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes,” said Janet McCrary Webb, president of Big Creek Lumber.
Environmental groups also need organizations to help manage land after they buy it. State parks agencies, the National Park Service and county parks departments aren’t buying as much as they used to due to budget limits. And timber companies can manage and patrol large properties, preserving wildlife habitat and water quality.
No logging will take place on the Gazos Creek property, which contains large trees and is in generally pristine condition.That property is open to the public through an existing trail that runs from Butano State Park.
But on the Valencia Creek property, where timber companies have cut trees three times since 1996, POST drew up a legally binding contract, called a conservation easement, that is attached to the land’s title in perpetuity, even if Big Creek Lumber eventually sells the property.
The easement requires that logging levels be light. Among them: no clear-cutting. No new roads can be built unless POST agrees. In addition, logging can occur no more frequently than once every 10 years, and no more wood can be removed than grew since the last time it was logged.
Webb said she expects her company, which has logged parts of the property before, will only cut trees in the forest about once every 15 years, and take roughly 25 percent of the timber volume.
She noted that since her father, Frank “Lud” McCrary Jr., and her uncle, Homer “Bud” McCrary, both now in their 90s, founded Big Creek Lumber in 1946 after they returned from World War II, the population of the Bay Area has grown.
Over the decades, more land has been purchased for housing and added to parks, limiting the timber supply for the family mill, which turns out redwood and Douglas Fir lumber, along with plywood, for homes and decks.
The company has worked to cultivate an environmentally friendly image, limiting its harvest levels, offering tours of its properties to neighbors, and working with environmental groups. It’s now the last sawmill left in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Across the state, environmental groups that once battled with timber companies are increasingly finding common ground.
Last year, Save the Redwoods League, a venerable San Francisco organization that has preserved more than 216,000 acres of redwood forest since it was founded in 1918, announced a $5 million plan to thin 10,000 acres of redwoods, Douglas fir, tan oaks and other trees. The logging will begin at Redwood National Park and Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park near the Oregon border over the next five years.
The goal is to restore lands that once were clear cut, speeding their recovery back to old-growth redwood forest conditions. That means taking out species like tan oak, that grew back faster than redwoods after heavy logging, or removing smaller redwoods and Douglas firs that compete with larger redwood trees for light and water.
“To restore these landscapes, we’re finding that many of the tools we have in the toolbox are tools that loggers are skilled at,” said Paul Ringgold, chief program officer for Save the Redwoods League. “It’s not always a bad thing to cut down a tree. In many cases, there is a very positive outcome that results from thinning the forests.”
A similar experiment is unfolding at San Vicente Redwoods Preserve, an 8,300-acre property in northern Santa Cruz County that was purchased in 2011 for $30 million by Save the Redwoods League, Peninsula Open Space Trust, Sempervirens Fund, the Nature Conservancy and Land Trust of Santa Cruz County.
Since then, the groups have contracted for some logging to restore old-growth redwood groves on the land and 350 acres of selective cutting to raise $500,000 to fund removal of old logging roads, invasive species and failing culverts.
Some environmentalists are still somewhat wary.
“It’s a case-by-case thing,” said Kathryn Phillips, state director of Sierra Club California. “If the alternative is a subdivision, the decision is easy.”
But, she continued, “There are examples of projects that haven’t been done well. You have to hope the environmental group involved has a lot of integrity and is well managed, and the timber company involved has some integrity, and an ethical approach to doing business.
“You have to watch each deal.”
