Known as the Gillette Ranch because it was once owned by shaving magnate King C. Gillette, the property links undeveloped areas in the second-largest watershed draining into Santa Monica Bay. It borders on the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, Las Virgenes View Park, and Malibu Creek State Park. The varied habitats it provides include coastal sage scrub, oak woodlands, willow scrub, and coast live oak riparian forest.

Soka University, a Buddhist liberal arts college, had placed an April 15 deadline on the purchase, necessitating a frantic effort to collect enough cash. The university will continue to operate a campus on the Gillette Ranch for the next two years, after which time the buildings are to be used as offices for the National Park Service, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, and California State Parks.

Sand hill bluff, in northern Santa Cruz County, has been a working farm since 1928, but its continuance was threatened in 1999 when the owners sold the 154-acre blufftop property to a corporation that planned to build coastal estates there. The Trust for Public Land stepped in, offering to buy the farm and keep it in agriculture. A deal was reached in 2004.

The farm is now being split into 90 acres of coastal parkland and 64 acres of working farmland. The State Parks Department will create a shoreline park that will include a mile of Coastal Trail, while Agri-Culture, a nonprofit organization that promotes farming in Santa Cruz County, has bought the inland acreage with $2 million from the Conservancy and $2 million from the Department of Conservation. Agri-Culture has placed an offer to dedicate an agricultural easement on the property, and intends to find a farmer to buy and work the land within three years. Agri-Culture will then hold the dedicated easement.

With the assistance of its partner, the Nature Conservancy, the Coastal Conservancy took advantage of a unique chance to protect and restore an entire working wetland ecosystem at Ormond Beach, in Ventura County.

The Nature Conservancy is purchasing 276 acres of degraded wetlands from the City of Oxnard and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California with $6.5 million from the Coastal Conservancy and $6.5 million from the Wildlife Conservation Board. The Coastal Conservancy will restore the property in conjunction with 265 acres of adjoining land purchased in 2003. Negotiations are under way to purchase another 220 acres of adjoining land and to create a 760-acre wetland—approximately the historic extent of wetlands at Ormond Beach. That is above the critical threshold for a wetland ecosystem, meaning that freshwater flows and tidal action are expected to be sufficient to sustain a healthy wetland even if the surrounding land is developed.

Some of that land is indeed developed—a power plant is operated on an adjacent piece of land, and a wastewater treatment or desalination plant might be constructed by the City or water district in the future. But there are also neighboring wetlands, including 2,000 acres at Mugu Lagoon. If all of the existing and restored wetlands can be integrated, they will make up Southern California’s largest coastal wetlands, stretching nine miles from Point Mugu to Point Hueneme.

Two communities at opposite ends of California got help from the Conservancy in building pieces of the California Coastal Trail. Crescent City, in Del Norte County, received $893,000 for the purchase of a property to serve as a trailhead and for construction of a stretch of the city’s Harbor Trail, which will be part of the Coastal Trail.

San Clemente, in Orange County, received $500,000 to be used as matching funds for a federal grant to build a three-mile trail along a railroad corridor.

The Crescent City trail project is part of the City’s plan, sponsored by the Coastal Conservancy, to revitalize California’s northernmost harbor. Although the trail segment is only .25-mile long, it is a crucial link, including a bridge over Elk Creek that will save hikers from having to traverse a busy section of Highway 101.

The San Clemente project is considerably more ambitious. The trail will run three miles along a busy railroad corridor behind the beach. An informal trail is already in place along the route, but it is both inconvenient and unsafe, as hikers sometimes have to walk directly on the tracks and must cross the tracks to reach the shore. The new trail will provide a safer pedestrian route and two crossings to improve access to the beach. Most of the funding, close to $4 million, is coming from a Federal Transportation Enhancement Activities grant, which requires a match for at least 25 percent of the total price. That match is being provided by the Conservancy, together with grants from the Air Quality Improvement Fund, the City’s General Fund, and a Community Development Block Grant.

Over 200,000 people a year come to the Año Nuevo State Reserve on the coast of southern San Mateo County, but many more would like to do so. About half of the school classes that ask permission to visit the reserve, home to the world’s largest mainland colony of elephant seals, are turned away for lack of space and resources.

That should change now that the State Parks Foundation has succeeded in raising the $3 million necessary for the construction of a new Marine Education Center. Three structures, left from the dairy farm that was on the site before it went into public ownership, will be renovated and converted into visitor centers and administrative space. The expanded facilities will contain numerous multimedia exhibits about coastal and marine environments, and will allow the center to increase its docent staff by 25 percent, to 255. More docents will allow more school classes to take guided tours.

The Coastal Conservancy put the final piece of funding in place by approving $350,000 to the State Parks Foundation. The largest share of the funding for the new Marine Education Center, $1.5 million, came from Proposition 40 monies. Another $1.2 million is being provided by private donors.

A trio of sensitive properties on the shores of Humboldt Bay, spanning both its geography and its habitat diversity, will be protected with Conservancy funding.

At the southernmost edge of the bay, the 5.5-acre Lighthouse Ranch will be purchased by the Wildlife Conservation Board, with the help of $500,000 from the Conservancy. This coastal bluff property, which overlooks the bay, the ocean, and the Eel River Delta, will be transferred to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for use as an administrative and visitor center for the more than 9,000 acres of public lands in the area: the Department of Fish and Game’s Eel River Reserve, the BLM’s South Spit Wildlife Area, and the County-run Table Bluff Park.

The presence of a public agency at the site is of great importance because some of the adjacent land has been used inappropriately. The South Spit became infamous as a squatters’ encampment in the mid-1990s, when more than 300 people lived there. Vehicles were abandoned, trash was dumped, and off-road vehicles wreaked havoc on the land. The problems diminished after Pacific Lumber Company donated the land to the State in 2001. The BLM took on management of the site, put up vehicle barriers, and started to enforce laws against camping and ORV use, but some problems remain. Having BLM staff working at the Lighthouse Ranch will help to keep illegal activity down while giving visitors a place to go to learn about the land.

The second property being protected is Freshwater Farms, a 54-acre parcel on Freshwater Creek close to Humboldt Bay. Now used as a nursery for native plants, it provides wetland and riparian plants for revegetation and habitat restoration projects. The Northcoast Regional Land Trust will buy the Freshwater Farms property with $255,000 of Coastal Conservancy funding, and will restore damaged estuarine habitat there.

The meandering streamcourse and tidal flows that once made the land such good habitat for juvenile salmon and steelhead have been disturbed by extensive diking and draining for a dairy ranch. Freshwater Nursery represents an innovative way to keep the land in agricultural production while maintaining key habitat, and collection of wild seeds and willow cuttings will continue under Land Trust ownership.

The third property to be protected is on the northernmost end of Humboldt Bay, in the unincorporated town of Manila. With the help of $490,000 from the Conservancy, the Friends of the Dunes Land Trust will acquire the 173-acre Poovey property and, with another $15,000, will undertake access management planning. The Friends will build a network of low-impact trails through the fragile upland dunes and along the beach, and will manage the property, which is just south of the 101-acre Manila Dunes Recreation Area, managed by the Manila Community Services District. Together, they will constitute 276 acres of contiguous protected dune land.

When tolay lake, Sonoma County’s largest freshwater lake, was drained by European settlers in the late 19th century to open up land for cultivation, the new residents found a wealth of small carved stone objects. Called charmstones, they had been used for both ceremonial and practical purposes by the local Alaguali tribe, and by visiting leaders from tribes throughout the West. Some of the stones were sent to the Smithsonian Institution, but no systematic archeological survey was ever completed.

The archeological importance of the land is just one of the reasons the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space Trust chose to acquire 1,737 acres of the ranch surrounding the lake, in the foothills of the Sonoma Mountains. The property was also under serious development pressure. With its stunning views of Oakland, San Francisco, and Mount Tamalpais, it makes ideal parkland.

In addition, Tolay Creek flows unimpeded from the lake to the Sonoma Baylands and provides a highly valuable habitat link for wildlife. That’s why the Conservancy granted $2 million to the District, which will acquire the property and then turn it over to Sonoma County Parks.

Life is about to get easier for a very hardy group of fish. The City of Albany is restoring a piece of Codornices Creek, an urban stream that still supports a small population of rainbow trout and, possibly, steelhead.

The current project would return about one-third of a mile of stream, which runs along three blocks at the city’s border with Berkeley, to a more natural state by removing a concrete wall and replacing two culverts with bridges. The unnaturally straight stream course will be replaced with a sinuous series of riffles, pools, and runs, and invasive plants will be removed from the stream banks and replaced with native species.

When combined with past restoration projects on Codornices Creek, this effort will bring to a mile the total length of restored stream. The $2.4 million project will be funded with $900,000 from the Department of Water Resources’ Urban Streams Program, $815,000 from the Coastal Conservancy, and $555,000 from local bond funds.

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