MercuryNews.com (free registration required): “A picturesque landscape of sugar pine, incense cedar and white fir trees adjacent to Yosemite National Park’s western boundary near El Portal will be protected from development under a deal announced Monday.
Owned by the same family since 1925, the 730-acre Ransome Ranch was purchased by the Pacific Forest Trust, an environmental organization based in Santa Rosa.
The property was part of the original boundaries of Yosemite that Sierra Club founder John Muir proposed in the 1880s, as Congress was first establishing it as a national park, said Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust. But because of lobbying by a timber company that owned the land then, Congress opted not to include it as part of the national park.”