California: Trees and plants of 982-acre Perazzo meadows now protected!

The valley known as Perazzo Meadows is a stunning landscape of woods
and watershed habitat surrounded by glimmering Sierra Nevada peaks,
but there is more to the high-country Shangri-La than sheer beauty.
“Protecting these High Sierra meadows with creeks running through them
are huge priorities,” said David Sutton, the Northern California and
Nevada director for the Trust for Public Land.

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“Perazzo has been a major priority for us since the mid-1990s. Buying
it means 2 1/2 miles of the lower Truckee River are protected and the
threat of land conversion is ended.” The 982-acre meadow northwest of
Truckee is an integral piece of an unusual land grant made almost 150
years ago that left pristine forests, rivers and valuable wildlife
habitat in the northern Sierra in a checkerboard pattern of
alternating public and private ownership. Bisected by a meandering
section of the Little Truckee River, the remote, snow-covered meadow
was in imminent danger of being sold to developers or parceled out for
vacation homes until a conservation coalition purchased it and two
other private properties from Siller Brothers Inc. for $6 million.

The Dec. 30 deal is the first major success of the Northern Sierra
Partnership, formed in 2007 as part of an unprecedented campaign to
take out of private hands 65,000 acres of land over the next three to
five years through a combination of purchases, conservation easements
and management agreements. The $130 million effort is part of a
broader plan, started in 1991 by the Trust for Public Land of San
Francisco, to permanently protect as much as 200,000 acres of private
checkerboard property in the region, which stretches from South Lake
Tahoe to Lassen Volcanic National Park. The Trust for Public Land
formed the partnership with the Truckee Donner Land Trust, the Nature
Conservancy, the Sierra Business Council and the Feather River Land
Trust in an effort to save the Sierra’s most unspoiled forest and
wildlife habitat.

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