It has been a little while since you’ve heard from us. We have been hibernating a bit, planning for the return of programs and writing lots of grants 🙂
 
The Crest is thrilled to announce that with your loving support we succeeded in raising $24,000 during our year end campaign to Help the Turtle Reach The Crest!! We were just $1,000 shy of our $25,000 goal! This has been The Crest’s highest year-end goal EVER and we are over the moon with gratitude for your care and support of our mission! 

An important $7,000 portion of these funds go into our Lanita Witt Memorial Scholarship Fund which will help offset the costs of summer programs for youth in need of financial assistance.

Thanks to funding through the Measure 99 Outdoor School Initiative, The Crest has built heated and covered ADA-accessible wall tents that can hold up to 60 campers. Rental of the off-grid campground at gorgeous Willow-Witt Ranch includes the use of a lovely updated outdoor kitchen, tent camping area, and a bathhouse. Gender neutral bathrooms and a nurse’s station are being built, estimated to be completed by 2025.
 
We would love to share this wonderful resource with other organizations/groups that are looking for a safe and inclusive wilderness site to host camps and events.
 
Rental costs are based on a sliding scale. Please contact us for more information.

Outdoor School

We are currently preparing for Spring programs and are looking forward to meeting new kids and families at the ranch! We do still have space for 5th/6th grade teachers to send their students to Outdoor School to learn about astronomy, birds, farm, forest, wetland and fire. We love the opportunity Outdoor School gives students to build deeper connections with the land and each other as they immerse themselves in the diverse ecosystems and animals of this land. Learn more about Outdoor School at The Crest.

School Field Trips

Our Spring calendar is already full with kindergarten to high school classes scheduled to come to the ranch for field trips. We are also looking forward to classes participating in stewardship projects in the wetlands. Learn more about school field trips at The Crest.

Nature Day Camps

We are excited to connect soon with all the returning families eager for Summer Camps 2024. We will offer week-long nature immersion camps again this year from June 17 to August 2, 2024. A limited number of camp scholarships are available. Learn more about Nature Day Camps at The Crest and how to register.

There’s a grove of Ponderosa Pines in our barnyard. They’re all mature, well over 100’ tall, and all with multiple ‘leaders.’ Conifers (cone-bearing trees) normally develop one dominant sprout to become the top (leader) of the tree (think of your Christmas tree…where  you put the ‘star’.) Trees in this grove all have a genetic mutation in which every tree allows multiple sprouts to develop as the leader of the tree, resulting in ‘candelabra’ trees. Any conifer can develop multiple leaders, but it’s uncommon for every tree in a grove to have that mutation. These are beautiful trees, all old enough that the bark is a puzzle of overlapping light red-brown, orange, and yellow flakes; they glow in the sun. Our ‘big barn’ was built near two of the largest pines, each with 8-10 leaders; we built our small timber-framed barn near somewhat smaller trees.  

The dominant leader of one of the oldest pines broke off in a windstorm December 2022, then summer/fall of 2023 brought the sudden unexplained death of another giant and the gradual death of four more of the largest trees…six in total. These pines were all >200 years old when we moved to the property in 1985. We logged them to avoid attracting Pine Bark Beetles to the still-healthy trees and sent them to a specialty mill to make lumber we’ll use on the property for the next 20 years.  

Trees’ permanence and long lifespan is illusory; though they ‘stay put’ they experience all the changes humans have wrought. They’ve witnessed hot summers and dry winters, torrential rains, root compaction, and insects. They attracted Pileated Woodpeckers as they died. Now the remaining stumps, nearly 4’ in diameter, will be used to teach students about the natural history recorded in tree rings, showing the years of ‘easy’ growth and the years of very constricted growth. We all play a part in showing next generations the amazing natural world we share.

To quote David Sobel, “Let us give children a chance to love the earth before we ask them to save it.”