California State Parks purchases the NoraBella parcel for $2.415 million, adding ridged forest and creeks to California’s oldest state park.
The acquisition — the park’s first acreage addition since Little Basin in 2011 — is a strategic move in the broader Reimagining Big Basin effort born out of the 2020 CZU wildfire. Planners see NoraBella as a natural approach to rebuilding a visitor experience: space for a welcome area at Saddle Mountain, room for shuttle access that keeps parking and buildings away from the most sensitive old-growth trees, and sites for operations that let the core groves heal while still welcoming visitors. California State Parks is advancing a facilities plan, general plan amendment, and environmental review to guide rebuilding.
The property itself has a checkered past — clear-cut a century ago, later used as a dump and infamous hoarding site, and then shepherded back toward health by successive owners and conservation partners. Sempervirens Fund — the group that helped create Big Basin more than a century ago — shepherded NoraBella into protection before conveying it to the state; earlier private owners, a high-profile clean-up, and subsequent environmental reviews all cleared the way for the transfer in 2026. The parcel’s streams, healthy redwood stands, and habitat for species such as mountain lion and gray fox add ecological heft to the park’s recovery plan. New state laws and ongoing partnerships aim to speed similar additions nearby, but NoraBella matters because it gives managers room to rebuild thoughtfully: a place to welcome people, and space for the forest to mend without being overwhelmed.
This is a clear win for conservation. Conservation is hands-on stewardship — knowing where water runs, which ridgelines shelter wildlife, and where human activity can occur in ways that respect the natural systems that make a place whole.
Too often, incompetent environmentalism, as practiced in the halls of California politics, wields the scythe of death and destruction across our lands. It substitutes land-management know-how with purple- or blue-haired slogans shouted by liberal mobs — people who have never seen the land and who live hundreds of miles away in treeless cities. It’s all top-down dictates, shrill-voiced ignorance, and clumsy, ham-fisted land-use choices that put the good of Der Party ahead of the good of the land. The result is always the same: damaged watersheds, forests overcrowded with stressed, sick trees fighting for the soil’s meager moisture and nutrients, and the tinderbox conditions that fuel insanely large wildfires threatening the communities and places we’re meant to steward. When the good of One-Party rule outweighs the good of land stewardship, California loses. Securing NoraBella has been the opposite of that impulse: it’s quiet, strategic management that repairs watershed function, protects habitat, and gives land managers the space to rebuild thoughtfully. That is conservation, and that is what endures.
You can read more about this remarkable conservation project HERE.
Find out more about the Sempervirens Fund HERE.
Learn about California State Parks HERE.
Reimagining Big Basin info can be found HERE.