Now & Then: For the Angelo Family, Conservation is in the Genes

By Jennifer Winger
 

The route to Angelo Coast Range Reserve is unconventional, but reserve manager Peter Steel knows it by heart: Bear right at the fork by the old redwood—the one with the signposts nailed pell-mell to the bark—cross the bridge over the Eel and follow the dirt path that flanks a fence studded with abalone shells. 

“It’s a beautiful landscape, and I’ve crawled all over most of it,” says Steel, whose grandparents, Heath and Marjorie Angelo, purchased much of the 4,000-acre mixed evergreen and hardwood forest in 1931.

The landscape of Steel’s childhood is also the site of The Nature Conservancy’s first preserve west of the Mississippi. The property has since been transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, with the Conservancy retaining a conservation easement, but it’s still breaking news. In February, Science magazine featured a study, with data gathered from the meadows of Angelo, on the response of grassland species to climate change.

The wild character of the reserve is largely intact, thanks to the foresight of the Angelo family. Alarmed by the commercial logging carving up the region’s forests, Heath and Marjorie began buying up nearby acreage. When property laws changed in the mid-1950s, and land became taxed for the value of its standing timber, the couple transferred their land to the Conservancy to ease their heavy tax burden and keep their acreage safe from development. In December 1959, as reported in Nature Conservancy News, the Conservancy made its first major payment of $25,000 to Heath Angelo.

What was once a family affair is now a lively research hub with 22 faculty members from 12 universities participating in research projects on-site. Scientists, like Berkeley professor Mary Power, flock to Angelo because it is part of UC-Berkeley’s Natural Reserve System—a network of outdoor classrooms and laboratories on 130,000 acres of protected wildland that offers an opportunity to conduct long-term, large-scale projects without disturbance.

Well, human disturbance, that is. “We go into all sorts of conniptions to keep wildlife out of the experiments, but it’s a joy to have them around,” says Power, who spends many of her days knee-high in Angelo’s South Fork Eel River studying its food-web ecology and keeping curious carnivores out of her experimental enclosures. “The otters love to jump in and make trouble,” she says.  

The reserve’s pristine lands and waters are also available for the public to enjoy. “No appointment necessary,” says Steel, whose two sisters and five cousins still drop by to revisit their grandparents’ legacy. “Show up, sign in and take a hike.”

When Steel decided to move to the reserve in 1984 to “give rural life a shot,” just like his grandfather did some 50 years earlier, he hardly realized he’d taken a stroll down memory lane—to Steel, it was just the road home.