In 2002, before the Friends of the Columbia Gorge Land Trust even existed, Friends assisted a Gorge landowner attempting to sell his 365-acre property to the United States Forest Service. Friends even sent a staff member with the property owner to Washington D.C., to lobby for funding for Gorge land acquisition.
 
All went well, but just as the funds for the Forest Service’s Gorge program were about to be released, the Iraq war was launched. Funding for conservation programs was diverted and the land was not purchased.
 
Ten years later, this same landowner reached out to our new land trust to discuss selling us a portion of that same property, a parcel wedged within a twelve-mile corridor of public land, to provide a key corridor for wildlife habitat as well as future trail development. After several months, however, those negotiations, too, did not culminate in a purchase.
 
This past spring, the landowner approached the land trust again. His mother had passed away, and with a large estate tax bill looming, he faced the difficult choice of either selling the property or logging his land. The roads were ready to be cut and loggers had been hired.
 
The timing was fortuitous. Our land trust had the funds available because an amazing donor had stepped up just a month earlier with a very generous donation for land. But there was still a significant obstacle: the property needed to be divided before we could purchase it and there was no way a land division could be implemented before the seller’s tax deadline.
 
Faced with losing this property a third and probably final time, one of our land trust trustees had a brilliant idea: if we couldn’t buy the land right away, maybe we could buy the trees first and the land later. Purchasing the trees or “timber rights” does not require a land division and the vast majority of the land’s value is in the trees. The landowner agreed, and with just weeks left before the tax deadline, our purchase of forty acres of trees went through.
 
Forty acres of beautiful forest that couldn’t be saved by Gorge protection rules were in fact protected because of a very generous donor and the resourceful, out-of-the box thinking of a Friends land trust trustee. With the moment seized and crisis averted, we are now working to subdivide the property so the trees and soil can be reunited under one protective ownership.
 
By Land Trust Manager Kate McBride, kate@gorgefriends.org