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Protecting the Heart of Mt. Hamilton Wilderness

Conservation Easement on Historic San Felipe Ranch Creates a 70- mile Corridor of Protected Lands

San Jose, CA — January 20, 2008 — Today, The Nature Conservancy announced that the 28,359-acre San Felipe Ranch nestled in the heart of the Mt. Hamilton landscape, just 16 miles from downtown San Jose, will be kept as natural rangeland and its open and rolling hills will remain the scenic backdrop to the east of the community for future generations.

Owned by the Hewlett and Packard families, the ranch is a keystone property creating the last link in a 70-mile long corridor of protected natural lands extending from Pacheco Pass to Livermore Valley, and spanning nearly 310,000 acres. By donating a conservation easement to The Nature Conservancy, the Hewlett and Packard families have ensured that the historic ranch will continue to look much as it did when the famous founders bought it in the 1950s.

“Over the past 10 years, as we’ve worked with ranchers and other partners to protect the private lands that connect the parks, I’ve watched intense urban development push right up to the borders,” said Mike Sweeney, executive director for the California Chapter of the Conservancy. “The past has given us a pretty good preview of what the future could be like without protection. The Hewlett and Packard families have been great stewards of the land and this easement ensures that level and quality of stewardship will always be maintained.”

When the families approached the Conservancy about the easement, the Conservancy quickly acknowledged that the land was an excellent match with its conservation priorities. The Conservancy previously identified the importance of the ranch, which at 44 square miles is nearly the same size as the city of San Francisco, more than a decade ago. The scenic oaks, year-round streams, seasonal ponds and wildflower-rich meadows of San Felipe Ranch represent one of California’s most iconic and most threatened natural landscapes. The combination of the large amount of intact flourishing habitat and the location of the ranch made it one of the Conservancy’s top conservation priorities to protect in the Mount Hamilton and Diablo range.

“Our fathers loved this land, for its wide open spaces, its wildlife and native flora and the ranching tradition,” said Julie Packard. “We wanted to ensure their legacy of protection and stewardship for this land continues into the future.”

Mary Jaffe, a member of the Hewlett family, agreed. “Our two extended families were highly motivated to protect this special California landscape from development, and the donation of the conservation easement was the best way to achieve that goal,” said Ms. Jaffe. “Going out to the ranch is like stepping back in time. It's a slice of old Santa Clara County with its strong agricultural heritage, an undeveloped ranch valley surrounded by open space and oak woodlands. We are thrilled to honor our parents and their stewardship by protecting the land that they cared about so deeply."

The ranch is situated among Henry Coe State Park, which at 87,000 acres the largest state park in Northern California, and Santa Clara county parks, Joseph D. Grant (9,553 acres) and Anderson Lake (3,109 acres). The ranch, which is located just four miles from the Highway 101 corridor, buffers these public protected areas from harmful development, contributes to the health of the region’s watershed and forms a vital movement corridor for wildlife such as mountain lion and tule elk that regularly roam between these protected areas. This historic agreement ensures that the property will continue playing this vital role and protecting the investments that Californians have made by setting aside these state and county parks.

“This is a huge victory for conservation for two reasons,” said Rebecca Shaw, director of science for the Conservancy’s California chapter. “First, this has global significance because the San Felipe Ranch harbors some of the most-biodiverse, most-threatened and least-protected habitat on the planet – the Mediterranean woodland. And just as importantly, San Felipe ranch is an important regional link in the mosaic of the Mt. Hamilton wilderness. As we look to the reality of looming threats such as climate change, corridors that allow plants and animals room to move and adapt will become increasingly vital to their survival.”

Conservation easements are often used to keep landscapes in traditional uses and preserve wildlife habitat by maintaining lands as private property and putting permanent, voluntary restrictions in place to protect the land’s natural values and prevent incompatible activities such as urban development. The Conservancy has worked closely with ranchers, farmers, forestry companies and other private landowners to protect more than two million acres across the United States with conservation easements. The conservation easement on San Felipe Ranch is the second largest in the California chapter’s 50-year history and the 24th easement the Conservancy has secured working with private landowners in the Central Coast.

The property is an active cattle ranch as it has been since its founding in the 1800’s after the creation of the Los Huecos land grant. What little development occurred on the ranch has been concentrated in two headquarters areas in the San Felipe and Packwood valleys. These headquarters account for approximately 95 acres of the property. Historically another 1,000 acres were farmed, although currently only about 600 acres are in agricultural production.

The remaining roughly 27,000 acres is a rich array of open meadows, forests and streams, which are home to a variety of species from badgers to burrowing owls to western pond turtles. Stewardship practices put in place by the families have kept the ranch and the wildlife in excellent condition. The ranch supports high quality habitat for at least 23 sensitive plant and animal species and at least 12 at-risk or poorly protected ecological systems, including now rare California native grass and wildflower fields and 15,000 acres of oak woodlands. These picturesque rolling oak savannahs for which California is known are considered to have the richest species abundance of any habitat in the state. Oak woodlands today are found in only a fraction of their original range.

“Cattle ranching can be a natural complement to conservation or it can be damaging,” said Shaw. “Clearly the management of the cattle operation on San Felipe is one of the former. The natural habitat and wildlife on San Felipe isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving.”

The conservation easement on San Felipe Ranch constrains additional development to a fraction of what would be possible under current zoning laws. Additional development is concentrated in and around existing headquarters, leaving the vast majority for natural plant and wildlife habitat, sustainable cattle grazing and low-impact recreational activities.

“The Conservancy has secured a really impressive conservation easement. This protects the north west side of Northern California’s largest state park so that animals can move freely and that Californians who come to enjoy Henry Coe will continue to look out over the beautiful vistas of San Felipe,” said Ruth Coleman, director of California State Parks. “The Hewlett and Packard families should be commended for this generous gift to conservation and to California.”

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.