Working with the Nature Conservancy

I spent the majority of the day today working at the McCarran Ranch, which is now owned by The Nature Conservancy. If you're not familiar with The Nature Conservancy, you should be (click on the link above). They are a conservation group that everyone should be able to love. They are an environmental organization that works to preserve critical habitat and areas of great biodiversity using easements, donations of land, and other non-confrontational methods. The McCarran Ranch is about 300 acres of land along the Truckee River in the desert just east of Reno.


Not the greatest day for pictures, but above is what the McCarran Ranch looks like. This particular stretch of river was artificially straightened by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1962. The Conservancy bought the ranch in 2001 for the unbelievable price of $300,000 (you can't buy a teardown in Reno for that price these days) and has been working for a few years now to rebuild fish habitat, restore native Cottonwoods and other native plants, raise the water table to help reconnect the river to it's floodplain and thereby revitalize rearing ponds for rare species of turtles and frogs--basically doing everything that should be done to restore a tiny portion of the river and protect it from insatiable developers.

What a marvelous legacy. The land around this ranch will inevitably be developed, the wide-open spaces of the American West will become a little less wide-open, and the world will become slightly less magical than it was. But this tiny piece of the Truckee will be preserved, and I feel pretty good about that.