 |
|
 |
| ||
|
Champions of a Wild Watershed
Tom Gamble's seen an eagle run after a mouse "like a cat with wet paws." His dad can identify a bird by the whistle of its wings, and says he's spotted blue oak seedlings this year for the first time in four decades. His grandad's gravesite, ashes scattered in the hills, was chosen as a home by the first nesting bald eagle pair in Napa County anyone can remember. Noticing these kinds of things comes from living on the land a long time, from walking and riding the acres year in and year out, from fencing it and finding its water and trying to get a living from it, the kind of time no scientist or government resource manager ever gets to give to a piece of land.
But pretty much everyone involved in a three-year-old partnership to create a Blue Ridge Berryessa Natural Area is as passionate as the Gambles, three-generation ranchers, about what landscape architect Robert Thayer calls "the dagger-shaped peninsula of wild, empty land dangling off the Mendocino National Forest and sheathed by Napa Valley vineyards and Solano County subdivisions."
This 750,000-acre chunk of land, gathered along a blue spine, is a place where California's human and natural histories collide. Here the silvery green serpentine rock cuts along the road evoke a zone of tectonic shifts, the golden grass is dotted with blue oak and the dirt bikes and jetskis coexist with mountain lions, tule elk and Canada geese. It's a place where miners have dug for gold and the government has taken land from settlers like Launcelot Gamble to build dams and bring water to the arid West. It's also a place where kayakers can get in a wilderness run and boaters can raft up to party, and where despite the fact that all the vehicles have oversized tires, they can still be burst by the fallen cone of a gray pine.
"People look up from the valleys on either side and see some kind of ridge up there that's low and dry and hot and doesn't have any pretty redwoods or big rocks, and they write it off; it's a kind of cognitive void," says U.C. Davis' Thayer of this place spanning five counties and harboring no more than about 5,000 people (see map page 2).
"But you go up there and you think you're in Montana or Wyoming," he says. "It's so remote you can't get a tank of gas between the Capay Valley and Clear Lake. It's a place you can really get lost. It gets under your skin and in your blood. That's why we all keep meeting, because we all really like the place."
This bunch of people first met in 1998, when Ray Krauss of Homestake Mining Company, which owned about 20,000 acres in the region at the time, decided to close up shop and invited the mine's neighbors to discuss what to do with its property. The company had already made a deal with U.C. Davis to convert its actual mining facilities and surroundings - world renowned as a model of environmental stewardship - into an environmental research reserve. But Krauss was still scratching his head about what to do with an 8,000-acre plot - park or public land or private grazing or what? The plot bordered the new university reserve and a 16,000-acre federal recreation area.
According to Cal Fish & Game's Jim Swanson, who attended that first meeting, he wasn't really seriously considering acquiring the Homestake parcel until "we realized that with the adjacent university and federal lands, it fit into a nice large landscape approach to the thing."
Then George Gamble, Tom's father, pointed out that they were just talking about "the tip of the iceberg" and suggested "the grander possibility" of conserving lands all the way from Napa's Lake Berryessa into Colusa County 50 miles to the north. Thus the idea of working together - scientists, government land managers, private ranchers and others - to forge a Blue Ridge Berryessa Natural Area was born. Membership in the group has since grown to 130 agencies, organizations and individuals, about 30-40 of which regularly attend the monthly meetings, and whose members include boaters, anglers, rafters, bikers, hunters, resort owners and elk lovers.
"We're not a police power or a planning agency, just a bunch of people interested in trying to conserve this landscape," says Thayer.
The partnership is currently doing some landscape-level think-tanking about a conservation strategy for the whole region, whose boundaries remain only loosely defined, and collecting data on the plants, animals, hydrology, climate, soils and human populations of the area.
The idea is to use this data to develop a series of "suitability models" highlighting which parts of the Blue Ridge Berryessa area are best suited for the preservation of biodiversity, for example, or for general recreation, tule elk, cattle ranching and the like. Collecting the data as one big integrated unit, instead of each individual organization collecting its own data and then not being able to make it match up on others' maps and computer platforms, is an enormous benefit, say members of the partnership.
The data, and the informationsharing opportunities of the partnership itself, will also facilitate more sensitive land-use planning. "When you're responsible for planning for one park or open space, you have demands from all constituencies, who all want something from your land, " says Krauss, who has moved on from his mine work to lead the partnership. Instead of trying to serve all users with one piece of land, the partnership can spread out demand across the region and focus activities - fishing, hunting, camping, etc. - in the most appropriate places.
Here's one example of how this all plays out. With the help of funds raised through the partnership, Cal Fish & Game did go ahead and acquire the 8,000 acres from Homestake, which it calls the Knoxville Wildlife Area. The wildlife area is adjacent to both U.C. Davis' reserve and the Knoxville Recreation Area, a dirt bike and big jeep heaven owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). At the partnership meetings, the university's Susan Harrison expressed concerns about OHV (off-highway vehicle) impacts on fragile serpentine ecosystems spanning all three parcels - historical OHV use of the area has included everything from tearing up and down the canyons to shooting at propane tanks and fleeing the fire ball. Private landowners at the partnership meetings, meanwhile, complained about OHVs trespassing on their properties.
"They drive over our fences, do a donut in the grass, then drive out," says Tom Gamble.
Meeting discussions led to major changes in BLM's trail enhancement plan for the recreation area, including the creation of loops and cut-offs to some dead-end roads into the most sensitive canyons. According to BLM's Rich Burns, the original trail enhancement plan had been embroiled in battles with Napa County and private landowners for years. "If the Blue Ridge Berryessa partnership had not come along, we'd still be in lawsuits over the trails," he says. "The partnership created a good forum for us to get public input." Indeed, some of the input came from bikers like Bill Dart of the American Motorcycle Association whose members are seeing themselves excluded from more and more areas of California. "He wants to have a place he can go and know he's not going to get shut out," says Burns.
"A certain level of trust has built up after all these monthly meetings," says John Hoffnagle of the Napa Land Trust, fiscal agent for the partnership. "All these OHV issues got dealt with in the meetings instead of the newspapers."
Since OHVs are not allowed on state lands, clear signage at the BLM's border with the new state wildlife refuge was also important. The partnership facilitated cooperative agreements about signage and public access. "This way, the public doesn't get surprised when they move from state to federal land and the rules change. Our maps now show both properties and make the rules very clear," says Fish & Game's Swanson.
This January, Swanson began another Blue Ridge Berryessa partnership project - sending out a convict crew to cut down the exotic tamarisk plant from the edges of Etiquerra Creek, then painting the stubs with herbicides to kill the invader. The tamarisk wreaks havoc on riparian zones, overrunning native vegetation and sucking the creek dry of water in the summer when species like the endangered red-legged frog need it most. The seeds float downstream and take root, so any eradication effort has to begin at the headwaters. Through the partnership, Swanson was able to gain access to the creek's uppermost reaches on U.C. Davis land before working his way downstream. "It's much easier to get this kind of watershed-level work done through the partnership," he says. "They even found us some money to do it."
Cathi Wilbanks is also happy to have the partnership's help with a slightly more political project. Wilbanks, who helps manage the Bureau of Reclamation's 1.6 million acre-foot Berryessa Reservoir and its 10,000-acre waterfront, is preparing new concession
contracts for seven resorts around the lake by 2009 and developing a visitor services plan as part of the process. Some contracts for long-term trailer villages date back to the 1950s, but Reclamation may move toward short-term uses like campgrounds and hiking support services. "We can become the gateway to the more dispersed recreational opportunities other agencies like BLM and Fish & Game may provide, and in this way take the pressure off them to also provide high-density visitor services," she says.
BLM's Burns adds that the partnership has helped "articulate to many stakeholders that not everything is a park, and that wild land doesn't have to have all amenities."
Just how many restrooms and water fountains and parking lots and trails the region should have has been much discussed in the partnership meetings, which has enabled new audiences to comment on the visitor services plan, says Wilbanks. In general, the partnership supports the expansion of short-term visitor services and is also interested in promoting hiking and non-motorized boating opportunities on the jetski and speedboat-jammed lake. The Gambles, whose property now fronts the lake, say that between Memorial and Labor days, it's like living next to Interstate 80.
But on a spring day this February, the lake was quiet. Riding down the lake's gravel eastside road with Tom Gamble, this writer delighted in the sight of a solitary bald eagle on a high branch, flocks of white pelicans floating and coasting over the blue water and tiny kestrels hovering like hummingbirds as they searched for rodents. A fence runs along the road to keep people out of the shoreline wildlife refuge.
Gamble isn't sure he wants to see more visitors invited to the lake. The way he sees it, the more services, the more growth pressure on the landscape. One solution may be to change the visitor mix, he says. Gamble also worries about growth pressure for the Blue Ridge Berryessa region coming from the Association of Bay Area Governments, which is asking each county to do its part to provide affordable housing for the region, a request Napa County has not fulfilled. "Napa gives Berryessa's water to Solano County and they grow tilt-up homes, so why can't they be part of Napa's housing solution?" he says.
Certainly the Blue Ridge Berryessa area lies in the shadow of creeping vineyards and ranchettes, the kind that have swallowed so much of California's oak grasslands already, and threaten the kind of ranching and farming livelihoods the partnership is committed to protecting.
"If there isn't some viable agriculture here, our ranches will all get split up and developed," says Gamble. "The only way the partnership can retain credibility is to have the participation of local landowners. The government doesn't have enough money to buy all this land."
"On the state level, we've been concentrating on buying pockets of wetlands and habitats for a few threatened and endangered species," adds Fish & Game's Swanson. "But this is a really large habitat of high-quality oak woodlands and grasslands."
Almost everyone who has hiked or rafted or visited its ridges and canyons has an amazing wildlife encounter story. Susan Harrison describes bellowing at a cow one day and getting an interested bellow back from a mountain lion. Thayer waxes poetic about one five-minute interlude in which he saw a roadrunner, got buzzed by a golden eagle and crossed mama and baby bear tracks not more than one hour old.
But the natural beauty on the surface belies one natural flaw, at least in terms of efforts to restore the Bay-Delta ecosystem. The landscape is rich in naturally occurring cinnabar, also known as quicksilver and mercury. Historic and abandoned mercury mines pepper the watersheds of the two main creeks draining the region: Putah Creek flows into Lake Berryessa, whose dam appears to be blocking downstream movement of the mercury; free-flowing Cache Creek is one of the biggest ongoing contributors to the Estuary's mercury problem. Fish in the S.F. Bay-Delta Estuary and Lake Berryessa contain such high mercury levels that there's a state health advisory limiting human consumption.
"Mercury is a much bigger problem downstream, and in local lakes, than at the headwaters," says U.C. Davis mercury expert Darell Slotton. The real problem is not mercury concentrations in the creek waters, but how mercury changes into a more biologically available form in quiet lakes and wetlands and then accumulates in fish and birds. "If you drank the water out of Cache Creek for an entire lifetime, you'd get about the same mercury hit as eating one meal of bass from the creek or Bay," says Slotton.
Slotton says Cache Creek, the retired Homestake mine site and its Davis Creek reservoir, and the surrounding historic mines of the Blue Ridge Berryessa area provide "one of the premier natural environmental mercury research labs in the world." Slotton has been monitoring different organisms in the Davis Creek reservoir and studying the seasonality, the spikes and drops, of mercury methylation (in which one kind of mercury gets converted into another, more available form) in the reservoir.
"The agencies are well aware of the historic mercury problem in this landscape, and are doing a ton of research to address it," says Slotton. "The spotlight directed by the Blue Ridge Berryessa group on this same landscape, with the creation of a research reserve at the Homestake mine, can only help." The partnership's work to find the most appropriate upland uses - uses that minimize road impacts and runoff and siltation and the creation of more pavement - will also help minimize water quality problems downstream.
There are still more stories to tell of this landscape, tales of the thriving forest of Sargent's cypress in the Cedar Roughs area, the unparalleled wildflower display threatened by star thistle, the three university research reserves where environmental scientists are studying everything from fire ecology to plant evolution, the interest of national conservation groups in the area's elk herds and wild turkeys, even the gas stations that have switched over to MTBE-free gas to protect the lake's water quality. Then there's Tom Gamble's dream of sustaining his ranching heritage with premium grassfed beef, the university's annual contest for the best poetry and photos about the region, the memories of Gamble's neighbor Herb Gunn, who traveled to Washington in the last days of World War II to plead with lawmakers not to flood his valley. And at the heart of all this now are the accomplishments of what Gamble calls "a confederacy of people who want to see basically the same thing on these lands" - the six conservation easements, 11 public land acquisitions, ten education efforts, 15 plans and studies, 27 habitat enhancement projects, and 12 improvements to trails and facilities undertaken through the Blue Ridge Berryesssa Natural Area partnership as of June 2001.
So why does this partnership have such vitality? Some say it's the enthusiasm and energy of Ray Krauss. Some say it's the passion for the place among its participants. Some say it's simply a good idea in the right place at the right time. "Whatever it is, I wish I could put my finger on it and patent it," says Hoffnagle.
Contact: Ray Krauss (707)539-4330 ARO
[ ABAG HOME | SFEP HOME ]
Copyright © 2002, San Francisco Estuary Project