Westfall Ranch set to become public land near Headwaters Forest Reserve

A 73-acre parcel beside Headwaters Forest Reserve is set to become public land this summer, giving Humboldt County a larger buffer at the north end of one of its best-known redwood landscapes and adding another piece to Elk River watershed restoration.

The land is part of Westfall Ranch, which Save the Redwoods League bought in 2016 for $1.1 million from Andy and Sandy Westfall. The league said the purchase was designed to prevent development, subdivision and commercial logging, while also restoring salmon habitat and eventually turning the property over to public ownership. More than 3,000 league members donated to the project.

If the sale closes as planned, the parcel will transfer to the Bureau of Land Management in July. Once that transfer is complete, the land will open to the public for recreation. That makes the project more than a symbolic add-on to Headwaters: it extends public land at the reserve’s edge, adds room for watershed repair, and creates the possibility of new trails where people can eventually walk into a landscape that has long been mostly protected from heavy use.

The federal role in the deal is backed by Land and Water Conservation Fund money, with $750,000 covering the sale price. The fund has financed land acquisitions since 1965, and since 2020 it has received full mandatory funding of $900 million annually, much of it tied to offshore oil and gas royalties.

The ecological value is tied to the South Fork Elk River, which runs for about a mile through the property. The former rangeland includes some second-growth trees, but the bigger story is the river corridor. California Trout says the Elk River is the largest freshwater tributary to Humboldt Bay and historically supported miles of habitat for salmon and steelhead, though today it offers limited critical habitat for federally listed salmonids. A conceptual restoration design already calls for removing sediment, restoring riparian conditions and adding wood structures that help fish survive and reproduce.

Headwaters Forest Reserve itself protects 7,472 acres of coastal redwood forest, including some of the last undisturbed old-growth redwood stands in the world. The reserve is habitat for coho salmon, Chinook salmon, steelhead, marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl and cutthroat trout, and it lies within the ancestral homeland of the Wiyot people. In its 2022 manager report, BLM said it had worked with Save the Redwoods League since 2015 on an 88-acre Westfall acquisition project aimed at watershed restoration and recreation access.

The same report said Headwaters drew an estimated 106,000 visits in fiscal 2022, about 180 visitors a day, up 25% from fiscal 2020. That level of use helps explain why even a 73-acre addition matters: in a place where public access, habitat recovery and watershed health all intersect, a small parcel can still change the map in a meaningful way.