President’s letter
onA letter from Save the Redwoods League president and CEO Sam Hodder in the Resilient Future Edition of Redwoods magazine, published Winter 2022.
Feeling your way through the ancient forest
on“As interpreters, our job is to help connect people with these special places,” says Robbins. “What better group of people to help make meaning of the places we steward than the folks who have been most connected to these landscapes for the last 10,000 years?”
Leave it on the trail
onIt was six months into the pandemic—a bizarre time that seemed out of a sci-fi movie. Like real life, the trails have their ups and downs (literally!). The redwood forests were our sanctuary. Walking among the giants at Henry Cowell, Mount Tamalpais, and Humboldt Redwoods state parks gave us perspective and humility.
Meeting the moment
onSave the Redwoods League has been so honored to have a relationship with Dr. James. As a member of our Redwood Legacy Circle, he decided last June that rather than leave a gift for the League in his estate, he would pay it forward now to meet the moment in these extraordinary times. We are incredibly grateful for his generous gift to the League.
New exhibit commemorates ancient fallen ‘tunnel tree’
onSave the Redwoods League, California State Parks, and Calaveras Big Trees Association opened the Pioneer’s Cabin Tree interpretive exhibit in the North Grove last July after storms toppled the tree in 2017.
Montgomery Woods Initiative
onTogether, these projects — the Montgomery Woods Initiative — are representative of the League’s big vision of landscape-scale forest protection and restoration and inspirational redwood park experiences for all.
Protected: Atkins Place
onSave the Redwoods League protected Atkins Place, a critical redwood habitat corridor bordering Montgomery Woods within the Big River watershed. Atkins Place features 335 acres of mixed coast redwood and Douglas-fir forest and 1.25 miles of high-quality streams for imperiled fish in the salmon family. Well-stewarded second-growth forests like Atkins Place, where the trees range in age from about 50 to 90 years, are key puzzle pieces that can help bolster the health of old-growth groves, watersheds, and entire landscapes.
Day One of Big Basin’s new era
onVisiting Big Basin Redwoods State Park on its reopening day. While the newly opened area might seem spare to some, it actually represents a ton of work in a short amount of time.
Programs reduce densities of birds preying on threatened marbled murrelets
onResearch funded by Save the Redwoods League suggests that programs designed to help reduce jay populations in areas where marbled murrelets nest, including old-growth coast redwood forests, will give these threatened seabirds a better chance at successful reproduction.
15 great redwood parks for people with disabilities
onWith towering trees and fresh, oxygen-rich air, redwood forests have the power to inspire and enhance the well-being of all people. Our new, free e-guide provides an accessibility overview of 15 redwood and giant sequoia parks.
Two historic projects
onWe celebrate the success of the Forever Forest Campaign and historic projects on the Lost Coast that restored Indigenous guardianship to Tcih-Léh-Dûñ and protected the spectacular Lost Coast Redwoods.
A family tree takes root in conservation
onA pioneering organizer inspires her descendants to protect redwood forests. More than 100 years ago, Eureka’s Laura Perrott Mahan helped galvanize the movement to protect old-growth redwoods in danger of being clear-cut. In recent months, dozens of Mahan descendants and friends continued her legacy by supporting Save the Redwoods’ work to protect coast redwoods — raising funds to help the League purchase Atkins Place in Mendocino County.
Time to spy a rare bird in the sky
onNext time you visit Redwood National and State Parks, you may see California condors taking flight among the redwoods. California condors, magnificent creatures that have been absent from this area for more than a century, were nearly extinct by the 1980s. Thanks to a monumental conservation effort and successful captive breeding program, there are now wild condor populations in Central and Southern California, Arizona, and Baja Mexico. Now, condors may even be returning to Northern California skies.
Giant sequoias’ declining wildfire resilience
onFor millennia, one of the defining characteristics of giant sequoias has been their innate resilience to wildfire. But in the last several years, severe fires in the Sierra Nevada have revealed an unprecedented vulnerability in the groves. League staffers’ publication in a scientific journal is the first to document this new phenomenon.
Thank you to our Forever Forest supporters for changing the redwoods’ fate
onThe ambitious Forever Forest campaign — now concluded — will fund key initiatives to lay the foundation for a new era of redwoods conservation. Even in the face of an unexpected global pandemic, unprecedented wildfires and climate change impacts, and some of the most divisive social and political times in America’s history, we as a community drew strength, inspiration, and resilience from the redwoods we all love.
Returning Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ
onThe League restored Indigenous guardianship to old-growth redwoods on Sinkyone lands. With their complex understandings of the land, based on traditional knowledge and lifeways within which redwood and other ecosystems flourished for millennia, California tribes are natural leaders and partners in land protection and conservation.
Protecting Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ
onTo ensure lasting protection and ongoing stewardship, the League donated and transferred the forest to the Sinkyone Council, and the Council granted the League a conservation easement. Through this partnership, the Sinkyone Council returns Indigenous presence to a land from which Sinkyone people were forcibly removed generations ago.
War stories from the 1960s redwoods conservation movement
onPhotographer and activist Dave Van de Mark helped to establish Redwood National Park by documenting the story of the forest. 50 years later, he is photographing the same places he helped to protect, in a stunning reflection on 50 years of transformation in the forest.
Goodbye asphalt, hello nature
onBy breaking ground, partners are writing a new chapter for a former Orick redwood mill site at the confluence of Prairie Creek and Redwood Creek. For decades the mill site has remained as a scar on the landscape, a reminder of that misguided past. Now that’s changing. The League has begun restoring the site and constructing a southern visitor gateway to Redwood National and State Parks.
Lost Coast Redwoods protected
onFive miles of the California coast and thousands of acres of redwood forest are protected forever. Save the Redwoods League acquired the land in December 2021. Now known as Lost Coast Redwoods, it is the largest privately owned California coastline in the coast redwood range.