When Lynda Hopkins made an out-of-the-blue call to a Sonoma County property owner, she didn’t think there was much hope of stopping the logging project planned on his land.
Hopkins, a Sonoma County supervisor, said it was an “11th-hour” effort to see if the owner would be open to selling their family’s nearly 400-acre expanse of land, mostly covered in redwood trees.
“To my shock, the property owner actually said yes,” Hopkins said.
So began a patchwork effort from community organizers, county leaders and a nonprofit partner to purchase the land for preservation. The $6 million deal is expected to be finalized next month.
On Tuesday, county officials voted to approve the funds needed to purchase the land known as the Russian River Redwoods. The land will be transferred to the Russian River Sanitation District, which will, according to a press release, ensure its “natural resources are conserved forever.”
Some trace the work of community advocates to protect the redwoods to one tree, one of the the tallest in Sonoma County, that sits on the property: the Clar Tree.
“It’s magnificent, and it’s hard to describe something that’s so immense,” Hopkins said. “You feel so small when you stand in front of it. The trunk is so huge. It’s almost like an ecosystem unto itself.”
While the nearly 2,000-year-old Clar Tree was not at risk of being cut down in the timber harvest, community members were worried about how the loss of surrounding trees would affect its ecosystem.
“Redwoods are a communal species,” Hopkins said. “Their roots actually link together under the ground. And when it comes to strong wind events, it’s actually the collective strength of the redwood forest, not the strength of individual trees, that actually enables that forest to survive.”
The surrounding forest also became important to community activists, who formed the Guerneville Forest Coalition to try to preserve the area.
“Guerneville was previously partly a logging town. There is an old nickname for Guerneville called Stumptown. But things changed in the 21st century,” Ed Yates, the GFC attorney, said. “The Guerneville area was no longer Stumptown.”
He said that the coalition was concerned with maintaining the area’s natural beauty, preserving its biodiversity and protecting its ability to sequester carbon. When the owner of the Russian River Redwoods filed a timber harvest plan in 2020 and was eventually approved to begin logging in 2022, GFC initiated legal action to stop it.
Hopkins made her call and learned that a sale was on the table — if it could be completed within months.
That short window didn’t give the county’s Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, which can make purchases to protect natural resources, time to go through the lengthy approval process to complete the transaction, so a nonprofit partner stepped in to make an interim purchase.
Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit that works to preserve redwood forests, agreed to lead a fundraising effort and closed on the property last September.
“That really took away a lot of the risk of the property immediately being harvested or sold to somebody else and gave us the time needed to put together the deal that you’re now seeing, where we’re spending a little over $6.1 million of local Sonoma County sales tax dollars to permanently conserve the property and its associated resources,” Misti Arias, the general manager of Sonoma County’s Agriculture and Open Space District, said.
The Russian River County Sanitation District, managed by Sonoma Water, will become the owner of the land thanks to funding from the county’s Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, which will hold a conservation easement and recreation covenant to ensure that the property’s resources are conserved. The land will be made available for public use in the future.
“I think it’s a beautiful place for hiking trails, and we have a mile of riverfront of the Russian River, so there’s opportunity to boat in, come in from a canoe or a kayak and then explore,” Hopkins told KQED. “The property is a tremendous asset.”
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