Conservation Group Buys Huge Sequoia Grove

The Save the Redwoods League announced it had purchased the Alder Creek property, which contained hundreds of sequoias.
Photo credit Save the Redwoods League
The world's largest privately owned grove of giant sequoia trees is changing hands.

The San Francisco based conservation group Save The Redwoods League is paying $15 million for the 530-acre Alder Creek property in the southern Sierra to help preserve the ancient trees for generations to come. 

The grove, located 10 miles south of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, is home to 483 giant sequoia redwoods, the biggest trees by volume on Earth. 

These trees are not only massive, they're old. Some were alive at the time of the Trojan War.  

Save the Redwoods' CEO Sam Hodder announced on the group's website that the purchase is part of the League's  Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative, a key element of the group's effort to serve as stewards of California's redwood forests far into the future. 

It follows the League's recent completion of the Redwood Genome Project, which is providing answers about how to best to continue its conservation work.

The League plans to gradually transfer the property into the federally protected Giant Sequoia National Monument. 

The property had been owned for years by the Rouch family of Fresno. Mike Rouch told the Mercury News that while they did harvest some varieties of trees from the land, they never touched the Sequoias. 

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