In The News

There was scraggly grass in one sand trap and wooden blocks and a toy castle in another, evidence of children at play. People were walking their dogs on the fairway, which was looking rather ragged and unkempt. This was only to be expected.

Nowadays, these grounds are mowed just twice a year, and haven’t been doused with pesticides or rodenticides since 2018, which was when this 157-acre stretch of land stopped being the San Geronimo Golf Course, and began a journey toward becoming wild, or at least wilder, once again.

A small number of shuttered golf courses around the country have been bought by land trusts, municipalities and nonprofit groups and transformed into nature preserves, parks and wetlands. Among them are sites in Detroit, Pennsylvania, Colorado, the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and at least four in California.

“We quickly recognized the high restoration value, the conservation value, and the public access recreational value,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which bought the San Geronimo course, in Marin County, for $8.9 million in 2018 and renamed it San Geronimo Commons.

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A spectacular 2.5-mile leg of the Pacific Crest Trail in California’s mountainous north state will now be conserved in perpetuity after environmentalists this week closed a deal on a key tract of forestland — part of a larger effort to buy up and protect every piece of land touching the 2,650-mile hiking route.

The 1,172-acre property, dubbed Girard Ridge, sits outside of Dunsmuir where the PCT crosses Interstate 5 and is easily accessible to day hikers and backpackers looking for a quick escape into the wooded wilderness. Dense stands of pines and firs on the tract break at a high ridgeline that faces across the Sacramento Valley toward the dramatic granite cliffs known as Castle Crags.

The Trinity Alps loom farther west, and Mount Shasta dominates the landscape about 20 miles north.“These opportunities don’t come around too often,” said Brady Moss, senior project manager at Trust for Public Land, the San Francisco nonprofit that brokered the deal.

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Late morning on a sunny weekday near the end of the school year, a group of kids shot baskets into a shiny orange hoop in the schoolyard at the Add B. Anderson School in West Philadelphia. A year ago, all these kids had to shoot into was a trash can they would drag outside, one teacher tells me.

“That yard was literally just concrete,” says Laurena Zeller, the principal at Anderson. “Broken concrete with a little weeds in between.”

Now, the space has been transformed.

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Less than a decade ago, the largest mid-elevation meadow at Yosemite National Park, nestled in foothills near Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, was privately owned rangeland. It was widely trampled on by cattle, dried up and of little or no interest to visitors. Today, the area is a whole different place.

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