—By Kasja McGeorge, Upper Willow Creek Landowner

In late September of 2006, Gene and Kasja McGeorge and their sons, Gavin and Nils, signed a conservation easement to protect their beautiful property on Upper Willow Creek. Here, Kasja McGeorge writes about the land and why the family made this generous decision.

I’m the one elected to write something about our new conservation easement with Five Valleys Land Trust because my husband Gene is busy weather-proofing the windows for winter. No matter, we agree on what I have to tell you.

We bought our quarter-section of creek-fed mountain valley forty years ago. It had been on the market for almost two years. It seemed dirt cheap to us, but the local ranchers had scorned it because it didn’t have enough pasture land to justify the asking price, and it wouldn’t have penciled out in the revenue department. It just wasn’t “useful” from a ranching perspective. There is some pasture, but a great deal of the property consists of lodgepole pine on the slopes and dense willows in the bottomland.

That doesn’t mean that it had not seen grazing use. The meadows and stream corridor had been heavily grazed and somewhat degraded. We heard that the beaver had been trapped out. And apparently, not long before we came, a massive spraying program to eliminate tree-killing insects had also managed to eliminate lots of the local fauna, including songbirds and other small critters, so that except for the indestructible Colombian ground squirrel, there was an eerie emptiness to the place, quite foreign to people from the California mountains—as Gene was—or the forests of Vermont, where I grew up.

But the place was beautiful beyond description, and today, the songbirds and beaver are back, along with countless other critters, large and small. Nearly every day, we watch moose browsing in the willows a few hundred yards below our kitchen window. A great gray owl has become a frequent visitor. We watch hawks and eagles circling overhead and sometimes the night silence is broken by the howls of wolves.

And from the very beginning, we had our own ideas about what was important and “useful” about this piece of land—ideas that we have discovered happily coincide with the conservation mission of Five Valleys. (In fact, when our oldest son read the first draft of the conservation easement, he remarked that it was simply an official statement of what we’ve always wanted anyway.) First, of course, we found the land to be a wonderful place to raise our children—and now our grandchildren—surrounded by such total beauty that we’ve never had to get preachy about ‘the environment.’ It is useful to be able to drink water, fresh and cold, from a spring off the high rocks. It is useful to breathe real air, all day, all night. It is useful to be able to build and heat our house with wood from our own property, without making so much as a dent in the abundance of the forest. It is useful to live far enough off the grid so we don’t get sucked in by consumerism, or by TV, except in football season when we have to make lots of trips into town.

Then there are other considerations that are not quite as obviously useful, and some of them are really the most useful of all.  At the top of this list is the fact that we must by necessity live in mutuality with the other denizens of the land.(Except maybe skunks) Is it useful to be constantly reminded that we humans aren’t the only creatures whose comfort and purposes matter? We believe it is. Is it useful to study the sky, the moon and the weather? Useful to split wood? Useful to play mountain croquet?  If there is any use in feeding the soul, then yes, all the answers are yes.

So it should come as no surprise that the four of us believe that one of  the most important thing we’ve ever done is to hang on to this place. It hasn’t always been easy. Every member of our family has awakened in the dark from a nightmare that a shopping center has sprung up right next to our house. The more we see developers creeping up our valley, the more grateful we are that with this conservation easement, we can now “just say no” to the many  attractive offers that have come our way. Sub-division here is now against the rules, period—end of any transient temptations to sell out.

Nature undespoiled literally heaves and thrills with the breath of life here. The less you pin it down, the more your feel it. What a privilege to be allowed into its silent mystery, let alone to live hand in branch with it. When I’m lying in bed with the wind tossing the window tarp, the rain beating on the tin roof, a murmur of distant thunder (I’m talking about just last night), I honestly cannot imagine anything better.

The pleasure of sharing our breath with that of the natural world is deep, pervasive, and life-sustaining. The assurance that in Five Valleys we have a strong partner in protecting what we cherish about this land has given us all a new sense of security. The knowledge that Willow Creek will flow and wind through its dense and living corridor for many generations, exactly as it does today, is a relief beyond measure for all of us.