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Proposed conservation area would preserve some of California's least-trampled terrain
excerpted from
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-berryessa22-2010mar22,0,7702234.story
3/22/2010--
The diverse 100-mile-swath of inner coast range land between the Bay Area and Sacramento, dubbed the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Conservation Area, is on a list of prospective national monuments.
(Editor's note: The land includes both public and privately owned lands. Monument status only affects the lands owned by the Federal government.)
...Four of the 14 sites identified as candidates either to become monuments or gain acreage via presidential declaration are in California: the Berryessa site, the Bodie Hills, the Modoc Plateau and an expansion into California of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument from Oregon.
...John and Judy Ahmann run Romagnola and Black Angus cattle on several thousand acres of ranchland that sweeps up from the shores of Lake Berryessa. The couple love the area so much that they have been exploring ways to preserve it.
...The couple have decided to place more than 3,000 acres of the ranch into a conservation easement that they hope will be folded into the prospective national conservation area.
