Kachemak Heritage Land Trust turns 35 this year and I invite you to celebrate our accomplishments and help chart our future to preserve land forever.
In the context of perpetuity, 35 years is a pencil point dot (like a tardigrade-sized slice of time). However, our past 35 years have set the baseline for KHLT to be successful over time. With solid finances, a stellar board of directors and committees, a spectacular staff, and the enduring support of our community, KHLT joins the best of the nonprofit world.
35 years ago, Kachemak Heritage Land Trust was incorporated, just one month before the Exxon Valdez oil spill, by a group of Homerites wanting to maintain our community’s unique feel for the future. We called ourselves a “landmark organization” as we were “faced with the challenge of being the first Alaskan land trust and serving as a model for future regional trusts.” Our original service area was Anchor Point to Koyuktolik Bay and included parts of the Outer Coast. Our newsletter is still called Landmarks, in honor of those heady early days.
Our Spring 1990 newsletter was titled, “…Launching the Boat” and described KHLT’s vision to maintain our “quality of life by balancing development with open space.” This is still KHLT’s philosophy. In a place so closely tied to fresh and salt water, the boat analogy makes sense, even for a land-based organization, as one always impacts the other.
Our Fall 1990 newsletter reported that we received a donation of our first computer, plants, a wall clock, and shelving. We had 201 members. That May, we hosted 30 people at our first Lodge Hop with brunch at Tutka Bay Lodge, lunch at Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge, and Dinner at “Ishmalof Lodge” in Halibut Cove. Marian Beck and Jan Schofield identified plants and animals and Mossy Kilcher sang to the guests between the feasts. That fall, we hosted a costume ball at Land’s End with prizes for the best Kachemak Sea Creature and we worked with Eagle Quality Center (pre-Safeway) on an extensive recycling program.
Kachemak Heritage Land Trust was the brainchild of naturalist and author, Jan Schofield and Sue Christiansen with founding board members Janice Schofield, Jon and Nelda Osgood, Roberta Highland, Robert Archibald, Mary Pearsall, Toby Tyler, Diane McBride, Devony Lehner, and Daisy Lee Bitter.
At the first KHLT gathering, Jan handed out local wildflower seeds to each person and, as reported in her book Beyond Road’s End, she said, “The land trust reminds me of a seed. And each of you is like the sun…The force is with you, the power to grow this seed of an idea into fullness. This is the seed of habitat, habitat for all, for all times.”
These creative, bold folks looked at the qualities of this beautiful place and imagined a way to ensure that those qualities could be preserved forever. With that end in mind, they figured out how to navigate from a clear idea and vision to acting to permanently protect land as the first Alaskan land trust. From the Kilcher conservation easement, the first conservation easement held by a land trust in Alaska, to our most recent conservation acquisition on the Kenai River, KHLT is dedicated to caring for each of our properties and the conservation easements for which ware responsible. Each property has its own needs and faces changes and challenges over time. As an example, KHLT has owned the Calvin and Coyle property next to Paul Banks Elementary School in Homer for over 30 years. This now 28-acre property is home to a wide array of birds and wildlife, sometimes including an angry goshawk, moose and calves, bears, dragonflies, Lutz spruce, Kenai Birch, alders, a whole lot of boardwalk trail, and a ton of thick forest moss.
I love walking KHLT’s Calvin and Coyle Trail listening for Townsend’s warblers, spotting tiny creatures in the woods, and checking out the stream at bridge two (built by an Eagle Scout). I love the crunch of snow on the trail when it is truly cold outside. With ice creepers on my boots, I still like to walk the Calvin and Coyle Trail in winter. I love wearing layers of turtlenecks and wool sweaters and boots or sometimes, though always a poor choice, Birkenstocks and handmade wool socks on the trail. Years ago, I used to run the trail, which is challenging with the many tree roots…
As one of KHLT’s longest owned properties, I like to think about what it meant to the donors, D. Bailey Calvin and Maury Coyle and Harry Buxton. I like to think what the trail means to the many, many trail crews who hauled wood chips by wheelbarrow, built boardwalk, constructed the Daisy Lee Bitter platform, completely relocated the trail and parking area in 2008 carrying so many long heavy boards. I like to think about visitors’ wonderful experiences on the many Shorebird Festival events held on the trail and the many student trail crews we’ve hosted on the property.
To me, the Calvin and Coyle Trail is a microcosm of our Kenai Peninsula community and of the mission of KHLT. This is the benefit of having a local land trust, we are all about protecting the places you love that are near where you live — forever.
Things change over time and things stay the same. As a land trust and, thereby a land manager, that’s something of which we are well aware.
When we received the Calvin and Coyle parcels, it was primarily old growth spruce forest with some alder and scattered Kenai Birch. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the spruce bark beetle infestation moved through the southern Kenai Peninsula, causing much die-off of the older spruce trees. KHLT stewardship staff adapted to these changes and, at least every 10 years, revises its management plan to continue to meet the donor’s intent and adapt to changes in the forest and in our community.
I see perpetual land conservation as a gift we share with our community now and with our community members of the future. It’s thanks to people like you, our supporters, that we can work together to keep special places on the Kenai Peninsula protected. A sincere thank you to everyone who has been involved in KHLT over the years. Please consider this an invitation to those of you who are new to the land trust concept to join our movement. We are proud of this stellar and stable organization that helps people in our community leave their legacy footprint for our community.
We are celebrating our 35th birthday at Angry Salmon in Anchor Point on Thursday, Nov. 7. We’d love for you to join us for this fundraiser dinner. Tickets are available on our website at www.kachemakheritagelandtrust.org/events and in person at 315 Klondike Ave., Homer. We hope to see you there!
Marie McCarty is executive director of Kachemak Heritage Land Trust.
