Congress Adds Land To Sequoia Park

Group raising $5 million to match grant for protection of 1,540 acres

Jane Kay / SF Chronicle 19dec00

Congress has added 1,540 acres to Sequoia National Park in the southern Sierra Nevada, granting protection to the last privately owned chunk of giant sequoias in the world.

In the last hour of its session Friday, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that expanded the boundaries of the national park to include the adjacent Dillonwood Grove, with its 2,000-year-old redwoods and cascading waterfalls.

Home to bobcats, black bears and brown trout, it connects with Garfield Grove -- which is roughly the same size -- combining to form one of the largest groves in California's unique giant sequoia forest.

The Dillonwood property is surrounded on three sides by the new 355,000- acre Giant Sequoia National Monument, which President Clinton established in April.

Save-the-Redwoods League, which brokered the deal, is raising $5 million to match a $5 million grant also approved by Congress from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund.

The 1,540 acres were owned by siblings David Reed and Susan Matthews, who inherited the land 16 years ago. Their parents, Forrest Reed, a professional forester, and Ruth Moore Reed, whose father worked for Pacific Lumber Co. in Scotia, bought the land 41 years ago.

"I feel great about this. This is what I wanted. If we would have harvested it, it never would have become a park," said David Reed, 48, who testified before Congress in July.

Reed has been managing the land for the past 25 years. It lies on the headwaters of the north fork of the Tule River.

"Every place is special. But this is a little more special," said Reed.

The family held out to place the land in the national park because, in campaign speeches, George W. Bush had said he might reverse some of the Clinton administration's monument designations.

The family decided to sell, he said, because it is "land poor." If Reed and Matthews died, their children would have to log the sequoias to pay state tax. "I never wanted to cut the trees," he said.

Over the past years, he has logged only the dead, dying and diseased trees and some young sequoias and white fir. "I left the healthiest and strongest," he said.

Seeing the effects of people on the grove will be difficult, Reed said. "Maybe 100 people a year have found their way there. It's a wild place. We have mountain lions, bobcats, black bears and a couple of species of spotted owls. The critters up there aren't used to seeing people."

The sellers placed a $10 million price on the grove by establishing the fair market value of the crop of trees that stands on the land today.

The giant sequoia, or Sequoia gigantea, is one of the largest living organisms in the world. Some of the trees in Dillonwood Grove are more than 20 feet in diameter. Much of the forest was logged between 1870 and 1923, and what is left stretches south of Lake Tahoe to Kern County.

Sen. Barbara Boxer promoted the bill and won the support of Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, who had opposed Clinton's creation of the monument.

Kate Anderton, executive director of Save-the-Redwoods League, said she spent a week of her vacation camping on the land in August.

"Waterfall after waterfall drops into pools down to the forest floor. There are massive giant sequoias, some thousands of years old, some with their feet in the water," she said.

E-mail Jane Kay at jkay@sfchronicle.com