New additions poised to turn Sonoma County’s Hood Mountain Regional Park into a 5-square-mile ‘urban backcountry’

A pair of decisions by Sonoma County supervisors last week finalized funding for the acquisition of two long-sought additions to the county park system, allowing 2,500-acre Hood Mountain Regional Park and Open Space Preserve to become almost half again as large and creating a 5.5-square-mile public wilderness just minutes from Santa Rosa.

At more than 3,600 acres, it will become the largest of more than 50 county parks and properties, edging out Tolay Lake Regional Park.

The two new acquisitions include the 888-acre Salt Creek Addition, part of what’s been known as the Weeks Ranch, and a new 253-acre section of McCormick Ranch along the Napa County line. Each is located north of the existing park, on either side of a 1,111-acre swath of the old McCormick ranch added to neighboring Sugarloaf Ridge State Park in 1996.

It’s a strange sort of puzzle, with chunks of state and county park interposed in random-looking ways but together creating a park complex of about 7,500 acres along the northern edge of the Sonoma Valley in the rugged Mayacamas Mountains.

The two new properties connect Hood Mountain and Sugarloaf in new ways, opening up new opportunities for backpacking and other recreation, and providing unrestricted wildlife passage through much of the Mayacamas.

The acquisitions additionally aid conservation of several creek headwaters and riparian corridors and prohibit any future development on the sites.

There also is plenty of room for flora and fauna from within and outside the properties to find new range as climate change alters local conditions.

“This is all part of the bigger push for (climate) resilience, for biodiversity,” Eamon O’Byrne, executive director of the nonprofit Sonoma Land Trust, which brokered the McCormick Ranch deal, said during a recent hike around its steep hills. “This is a habitat stronghold.”

More broadly, the additions contribute to a vast swath of contiguous, protected land patched together over time by county and nonprofit agencies along the southern edge of the Mayacamas. Much of it is within an 85-mile wildlife movement corridor, part of a critical linkage between the Marin Coast and the mountains of Napa and Lake counties.

McCormick Ranch Area With Corridor (May 2023)-3.PDF

A few more acquisitions already in the pipeline will connect Sonoma County’s not-yet-opened Calabazas Regional Park and Open Space Preserve in Glen Ellen to LandPaths’ Rancho Mark West on St. Helena Road and Mark West Creek, stretching 14.5 miles tip-to-tip and creating more than 13,500 acres, or 21 square miles, of adjacent land in conservation, according to Jennifer Kuszmar, acquisition manager for the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District.

An additional 401 acres of the newly purchased McCormick Ranch property in Napa County was included in the deal and is to be transferred by the Napa Land Trust to the Napa County Regional Park and Open Space Preserve.

“It’s landscape-scale conservation,” Kuszmar said. “ … It’s like a win-win-win-win.”

Hood Mountain — “a sentinel overlooking the Valley of the Moon,” as Supervisor Susan Gorin put it — is one of the wildest and steepest in the regional park system, its trails and fire roads offering miles of hiking opportunities through forest and woodland, though much of it is still recovering from recent wildfires.

High above the existing park and its main entrance off Pythian Road is Gunsight Rock, an outcropping overlooking the Sonoma Valley from the highest point in the Mayacamas Mountains at 2,730 feet — the reward for an often steep, half-day hike and part of the original park.

Since its creation in 1975, almost two dozen acquisitions have filled in gaps in the county park, as well as neighboring Sugarloaf Ridge State Park.

One primary and arduous route, along the Nattkemper/Goodspeed trails, connects the two parks, rising from the Adobe Canyon Road at Sugarloaf into the county park and connecting to Gunsight Rock. A lesser used access point from Hood Mountain’s Los Alamos entrance leads across Santa Rosa Creek into the northern reaches of Sugarloaf Ridge via Homestead Meadow and the Quercus Trail.

But visitors are always asking about additional connectors, Sonoma County Regional Parks Director Bert Whitaker said.

Some time in the future, visitors will have more northerly options through the new McCormick addition between the two parks, allowing visitors access to the panoramic views from 2,500-foot Big Hill, south toward San Francisco and east across the county line and down a steep incline into St. Helena down, and offering potential for overnight trips.

“This acquisition really creates an urban backcountry,” Whitaker said recently during a visit to the McCormick site. “Multiday trails are a real possibility.”

The McCormick land, eyed for conservation for a quarter century, was purchased by the Sonoma Land Trust in late October for $14.3 million, which includes the land in both counties. The Sonoma County portion already was covered by a conservation easement.

Jim Perry and his family, owners of the property, contributed $3.4 million by discounting the price to under $11 million, county officials said.

The county’s Open Space District contributed $3.5 million toward the purchase. Other contributors included the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, California State Coastal Conservancy, California Natural Resources Agency, California State Parks’ Habitat Conservation Fund and the Sonoma Land Trust itself.

The land trust announced the deal in 2019 but then had to postpone the purchase for a variety of reasons. Among them, said Whitaker, was a $4 million funding gap created when the partners had to let go of a state Department of Fish and Wildlife grant because it would have prohibited horses on the land.

“We’ve been pretty adamant that horses and bicyclists be allowed,” he said.

When funding was still short just a few months ago, philanthropists Jeff and Laurie Ubben donated $1.5 million to get the deal across the finish line, O’Byrne said.

“It’s rugged and very special country,” Whitaker said, “in addition to all the resource benefits.”

The $4.2 million Weeks Ranch deal came together much faster, with the Open Space District paying $3.48 million and the Sonoma Land Trust contributing $720,000 through a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The property will be accessed via Hood Mountain’s Los Alamos Road entrance. It will take quite a bit longer to plan for public access, Whitaker said, but once visitors are welcomed in, it’s the kind of place that should offer ready access by car, though along very steep roads, Whitaker said.

But once inside “the experience we envision in the future is one where you get out of your car and immediately have those amazing views,” he said.

“We talk about landscape scale conservation,” said Kuszmar, “and this is really beginning. Now we’re seeing this happen.

“In reality, it’s been decades in the making. These two landscapes have previously been conserved, but under private ownership. Now there’s the benefit of people being able to go on it.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On X/Twitter @MaryCallahanB.