On a beautiful sunny morning in April, The Conservation Alliance staff, member company employees, and partners joined the John Muir Land Trust for a day of work at Almond Ranch in northern California, a 281 acre landscape that TCA funding helped secure in 2020. Nearly 30 participants in total gathered, including employees from Peak Design, Eventus, GU Energy Labs, Exact Change, Atmos, SmugMug / Flickr, and Camelbak. Together, we hiked 8 miles round trip from the John Muir National Historic Site, up Mount Wanda, one of the first JMLT properties, and finally to Almond Ranch.
Our goal was to support our longtime grantee, the John Muir Land Trust, in their efforts to protect the places that make the East Bay special. To do this, we conducted an invasive plant removal and tree planting. Our volunteer crew raised over 18 California buckeye (Aesculus californica) trees along either side of a drainage off the Bay Area Ridge Trail to create a hopeful grove for hikers to walk through for years to come.
Most of the group tackled, whacked, grubbed, pulled, and ripped out an estimated 8,000 individual purple starthistle (Centaurea calcitrapa) plants. This was a great project for a group of our size because hand pulling or grubbing purple starthistle is the most effective form of control for individual plants that border new invasions. Because manual removal is labor intensive, often populations get neglected by other land managers.
This was the first Backyard Collective Event held by The Conservation Alliance since 2020, as they were put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our BYC events were first launched in 2009 and have long played an important role in connecting member company employees with local grantees for a day of action in a landscape that TCA funding helped protect. We’re excited to bring these events back with more happening later in the year!
