Mendocino Land Trust announces that Ann Cole will retire in the spring of 2020 after seven years as executive director. The Land Trust’s Board of Trustees will begin the hiring process for her replacement in mid-January.

The Board of Trustees expresses its tremendous gratitude to Ann for her dedicated service, vision and leadership. “For the past seven years, Ann has been a terrific advocate for Mendocino Land Trust and all those who cherish the natural resources of Mendocino County,” says John Swartley, board president. “Ann’s commitment has greatly enhanced the Land Trust’s capacity and increased awareness throughout our community of the organization’s important conservation work.”

Under Ann’s leadership, Mendocino Land Trust brought national recognition to Mendocino County with its achievement of Land Trust Accreditation status, a significant milestone for the organization that improved and stabilized operations and its financial foundation. Ann also guided team members and the board in conserving thousands of acres of land, building miles of new trails and completing dozens of salmon habitat restoration projects. Her efforts garnered new partnerships, shepherded in a new strategic plan and placed the organization in a strong position for continued growth.

Ann has had an extensive career in land use law, environmental project management and executive leadership, including 10 years with the Trust for Public Land, a national conservation organization. She became executive director of the Mendocino Land Trust in March 2013. In that same year, Ann received the Conservation Lands Foundation’s “Advocate of the Year” Award for her leadership role in advocating for national monument designation for the Point Arena-Stornetta lands, which are now a part of the California Coastal National Monument.

Mendocino Land Trust has been a leader in land conservation, stewardship and habitat restoration in Mendocino County for more than 40 years. Well known for its extensive network of coastal beaches and public access trails, Mendocino Land Trust also engages in land conservation projects countywide. Since 1976, Mendocino Land Trust has worked with willing landowners to protect more than 14,000 acres of forests, wildlife habitat and agricultural lands in Mendocino County.

Press Release PDF

Mendocino Land Trust is bringing the Wild & Scenic Film Festival to Fort Bragg! The two-day festival kicks off with a gala fundraiser on Friday, November 15, with five short films, a silent auction and live fund-a-need. Tickets are $50 and include food by Harvest Market, wine from Bonterra and beer from North Coast Brewing Co.

The festival continues on Saturday, November 16 with an inspiring selection of family-friendly short films, a children’s activity room, food and drink for purchase, and opportunities to engage with local nonprofits. Tickets are $15 for adults and $5 for youth (under 18).

The fund-a-need at the Friday gala will benefit Mendocino Land Trust’s summer internship program. This program has trained 12 college students over six years, and these students, with their boundless energy and enthusiasm, have become integral to the summer project work of Mendocino Land Trust. Contributions made at this fundraiser will help to provide additional students with the opportunity to learn from this life-changing experience.

For Saturday’s event Mendocino Land Trust has teamed up with local nonprofits and businesses to show 12 short films over the course of the afternoon. The films cover a lot of ground, from a story about a Kansas farmer improving his farm’s resilience to drought through regenerative agricultural practices, to a lighthearted animated orchestra describing the sleep-cycle of hibernating animals. This film festival brings together a series of diverse stories that remind us all of our deep connection to the places we love and why we work to create positive change in our communities.

California Coastal Cleanup Day, is preparing to celebrate its 35th anniversary! The event will take place on Saturday, September 21, from 9 a.m. to 12 noon at nineteen locations throughout Mendocino County and more than 1000 locations around the state, comprising the largest single effort to remove the debris that has accumulated on California’s beaches and inland shorelines over the past year.

Mendocino Land Trust, which has organized Coastal Cleanup Day in Mendocino County since 2003, invites everyone to help protect our fragile marine environment by joining together with families, friends, students, businesses and service groups to clean Mendocino County’s beaches and waterways. With nineteen cleanup locations along the Mendocino coast, stretching from Westport to Gualala, and an inland stream cleanup in Ukiah, there’s surely a cleanup site near you that could use your help. Grab a friend, a bucket and some gloves and show our beaches some love.

These local efforts are part of a larger statewide event coordinated by the California Coastal Commission, bringing tens of thousands of volunteers to the state’s beaches and inland shorelines. Last year, the statewide cleanup brought over 65,000 volunteers out and removed over 600,000 pounds of debris! The event marks California’s contribution to the International Coastal Cleanup, organized by the Ocean Conservancy, an annual service day that takes place in 45 states and more than 100 countries each September. Through this vital international, statewide, and local community event, we hope to encourage the enhancement of the California coast for current and future generations.

Update: September 11, 2020

This project is now complete! Huge thanks to all of the organizations and individuals who helped bring it to completion. Many future generations of fish and other aquatic and amphibious life salute you.

August 28, 2019

We’re at it again this summer with our ongoing stream habitat restoration projects to benefit coho salmon, funded by two grants from California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fisheries Restoration Grant Program. 

The coho salmon is an endangered species. Where a single stream was once home to tens of thousands of individuals, now only one or two hundred rugged coho currently return to spawn each year. Mendocino Land Trust is working alongside many other organizations to reverse historic human practices in an effort to restore coho salmon to sustainable numbers. 

By removing logging roads and restoring these areas to natural conditions, we reduce the amount of sediment entering the creek. This improves the chance that fertilized salmon eggs will produce live fish, since fine sediment from roads and other sources smothers the gravel needed for spawning and young coho survival. This road removal process is called road decommissioning. 

The road shown in the top photo is in Jackson Demonstration State Forest and was right next to the banks of Bunker Gulch. This road is now gone and the stream bank is reconnected to the hillside. 

In conjunction with the road decommissioning, we are partnering with the California Conservation Corps to restore salmon habitat at Hare Creek and Bunker Gulch by installing large logs with massive roots in the stream. These large logs will create deeper pools and slower flows for adult fish to rest on their epic journey, while at the same time providing cover for young fish to avoid predators.

 

A team of highly skilled large equipment operators and several California Conservation Corps crews have been on site for many weeks and are nearing completion.  It is exciting to see these large tractors at work in the otherwise peaceful forest. At first, it’s a bit odd, as this is an environmental restoration project after all, and all that tractor work seems out of place.  But if you watch for a while, you can see how the crews gradually shape a glen that begins to look like it once was before the logging road was there.  The flat road bed is rounded off with graders, and sloped back to the way it was before, a stream bank, as shown above.  

The crews cover newly graded stream banks with lots of branches and other plant material so that the soil will remain in place when the rain returns.  The tractors also dig out all the culverts that were placed under the road for the side streams that flow into Hare Creek, and re-create the original gullies, through which the waters will naturally flow, once again. 

Finally, as we’ve done for many years at different locations, we’re installing large pieces of trees in the streambeds at Hare Creek and Bunker Gulch.  Here again the large tractors cable-pull huge fallen trees off the hillsides, pick them up like toothpicks and swing them around (see top photo) before gently placing them into the stream banks to create deep pools in the water.  

We are very happy to announce the permanent conservation of 879 acres of former PG&E land along Trout and Alder creeks in the Eel River watershed. The land has been conveyed to the Potter Valley Tribe and a conservation easement, guaranteeing permanent protection of the land, has been donated to Mendocino Land Trust. Together, the Potter Valley Tribe and Mendocino Land Trust will protect the conservation values present on these properties, including fish and wildlife habitat, open space, public view-shed, forest ecosystems, historic and cultural values and public access.

Read the full press release here.

Big thank you to Assemblymember Jim Wood and all of the amazing volunteers who came out in the drippy coastal fog, for a day of stewardship at Navarro Point Preserve. The day was a complete success and so much fun! The boardwalk was realigned, old signage was removed and replaced, the steps were re-graveled and the battle against invasive plants continued. Hard work is always better with friends.

Grant funding awarded for pgymy forest protection

Mendocino Land Trust has received funding from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to acquire a 93-acre conservation easement off of Gordon Lane, just south of Mendocino, with the purpose of conserving 49 acres of rare pygmy forest.

Residents of California’s North Coast have long admired these enchanting tiny forests, but their rarity and sensitivity have not always been well understood. A recently completed, four-year study, conducted by CDFW and the California Native Plant Society (CNPS), examined the unusual qualities of the soil and plant associations that have, over centuries, created the dynamic habitat of the Mendocino pygmy forests. Their study indicates that certain combinations of plants are particularly rare. The 49 acres of forest covered by this conservation easement contains some of the rarest associations of pygmy-type vegetation.

The Mendocino cypress pygmy forest has a very narrow range, running from Fort Bragg to Salt Point State Park in Sonoma County. This unique, geographically limited habitat is particularly vulnerable to habitat destruction and fragmentation from housing development in the highly desirable coastal zones of Mendocino and Sonoma counties. This new easement creates a contiguous corridor of protection for the pygmy forest directly to the south of Mendocino Headlands State Park, over 7,000 acres of which was acquired and permanently protected by Mendocino Land Trust before being turned over to California State Parks in 2002.

“The natural resources on this site are of cultural and ecological value to the North Coast, and this project has multiple benefits to the community, including conserving open space, carbon sequestration, protecting rare and endangered species, and improving spawning habitat of the endangered coho salmon and steelhead in Big River,” explains Mendocino Land Trust’s Executive Director Ann Cole. “The current property owners are excellent stewards of the land, having purchased the property with the intent of protecting the delicate pygmy ecosystem found there. We are grateful that they reached out and worked closely with us to make this happen.”

Download full press release here.

Stewarding our shared spaces

Hare Creek beach and trail are located along the southern boundary of the City of Fort Bragg. This Mendocino Land Trust-owned beach has a particularly lush trail that follows the creek for a bit before it opens onto a beautiful little pocket beach. Every one of Mendocino Land Trust’s trails requires regular maintenance, and each has its own challenges. Hare Creek trail is heavily used by the public which means litter is a problem, and it also has a number of extremely invasive, non-native plants along the trail and creek.

Without the passionate volunteers who collectively give hundreds of hours of their time to this place, it would quickly become overgrown, less beautiful and more difficult to access. Whether performed monthly, annually or only once, each volunteer hour is of great value, and we are all deeply grateful. From dedicated monthly volunteers to school groups to visiting divers, it takes a village to keep these beaches and trails open and accessible to the public.

The Hare Creek Beach Stewards

This small group of very dedicated volunteers has, for many years now, been meeting once a month to perform regular maintenance on Hare Creek beach and trail. Betty Stechmeyer, Lenny Noack and Pat Tilley are the primary members of this stalwart crew. With seemingly endless patience and persistence, they tackle the garbage and invasive plants that come back month after month, year after year. While this kind of work can feel Sisyphean, over time, their efforts have transformed the trail down to Hare Creek. They encourage others to join them and have recently welcomed their newest member, Elizabeth Pippin. We are so grateful for their time, energy and community spirit.

Anchor Academy

The Anchor Academy is an alternative school within Fort Bragg High School, and service learning provides a viable alternative to the traditional classroom setting. Anchor Academy has partnered with Mendocino Land Trust for several years, connecting students with the land and their community through stewardship. Several times a month, these students pick up garbage and pull invasive plants. Their work contributes greatly to our ongoing maintenance efforts.

Right place, right time

In addition to its steadfast volunteers, Hare Creek has been getting some extra love lately from friends in faraway places. Extreme high tides and heavy winter surf have been taking quite a toll on our coastal areas, and the strength of the ocean means the damage can be significant. This last winter, the high surf completely overtook the beach and came up the creek, dislodging and relocating a couple sections of the trail’s boardwalk. Each section weighs hundreds of pounds, which made moving them back into position a daunting task. It was looking like taking them apart and reassembling them would be the best option one day last month when a group of folks from the Humboldt State University Scientific Diving program walked by on their way to check out the surf. They all pitched in to help, quickly lifting and moving the heavy sections of boardwalk back into place, saving our staff and volunteers hours of time. Huge thank you to Hanna, Rich, Steve and Nick!

Voyage to Excellence

This group of students came all the way from Alaska to ride their bicycles along the Northern California Coast. They cycled from Eureka to San Francisco, through rain and shine (unfortunately, mostly rain). While they were in Fort Bragg, they spent a day volunteering with Mendocino Land Trust at Hare Creek Beach. The king tides that moved the boardwalks also pushed dozens of large logs up the beach, near the trail. After pulling invasive plants all morning, the students learned how to use some pretty cool tools for moving heavy logs and spent the afternoon creating a well-defined path from the beach to the trail.

If you are interested in volunteering in any way, we need your help! From working outside caring for our preserves to indoor business-related tasks, we can find an opportunity for you. Email or call our office at (707) 962-0470 to get involved. Visit our Events page to see what’s on the calendar right now.

To learn more about this trail and other trails up and down the coast, please visit our Coastal Trail Guide.

We are so pleased to have had Doug Kern on our team for more than five years — he has completed some amazing projects. Doug’s professionalism, tireless work and passion for conservation have left an indelible mark on Mendocino Land Trust, and he will be missed by everyone fortunate enough to have worked with him. Mendocino Land Trust Board of Trustees and staff members wish Doug all the best in his new position as Executive Director of the Gaviota Coast Conservancy.