In January, Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) purchased a 2,284-acre parcel on the southern slope of Santa Cruz Mountains, preserving a site where a proposed sand-and-gravel quarry was scrapped following a decade-long, Indigenous-led campaign opposing the project.
It’s the third parcel the environmental nonprofit has acquired within a 6,500-acre property, known as Sargent Ranch, over the past two years. POST has plans to conserve the remaining 480 acres of the ranch by the end of the year. Located southwest of Gilroy, among oak-studded foothills that descend into the Upper Pajaro Valley, the land serves as a crucial wildlife corridor for several imperiled species that travel between the Santa Cruz range and the Gabilan Mountains to the south.
POST president Gordon Clark said that the organization had engaged former owners of the ranch at different times over the past several decades with hopes of acquiring Sargent Ranch, which is more than six times larger than Golden Gate Park. Bounded to the east by Highway 101, the open space provides valuable habitat for mountain lions and badgers, while its seasonal streams and ponds support threatened species such as the California tiger salamander and California red-legged frog.
“It is a pretty massive ecosystem at the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains, which form the backbone of the San Francisco Peninsula,” Clark says. “So Sargent Ranch represents the centerpiece of a vision we have to maintain those linkage points for wildlife, and to ensure that—from an ecological standpoint—our region is connected to the rest of the state.”
An Improbable Outcome
Preserving the parcel seemed like an improbable outcome as recently as last spring, when the previous landowner’s proposal to operate an open-pit mine was reportedly still under review by the Santa Clara County planning department. But the project faced staunch opposition, particularly from members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, who organized marches and rallies in Gilroy and Mission San Juan Bautista to protest the mining project.
After the quarry was proposed in 2015, the tribe partnered with Green Foothills, a local grassroots environmental organization, and other advocacy groups to form the Protect Juristac coalition, whose opposition intensified after the county released a draft environmental impact report in 2022. A rally organized by the Indigenous-led group drew hundreds of people to the county seat in San Jose, where tribal members delivered speeches and performed traditional songs before presenting county officials with a bundle of petitions containing 20,000 signatures.
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The environmental review drew several thousand public comments opposing the project, while local governments including the City of Santa Clara and the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors passed resolutions in support of the Amah Mutsun’s efforts. “The Protect Juristac campaign played a critical role in galvanizing public support for the protection of the property,” Clark says, noting that, while POST was not involved in the advocacy efforts, they did make POST’s eventual purchase “more possible.”
Juristac, an area of strong medicine
The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band has deep ancestral ties to the property, which lies within a much larger area known by tribal members as Juristac, a landscape that holds profound spiritual and historical significance to the California tribe, according to tribal chairman Ed Ketchum. In the centuries before Spanish colonizers forcibly relocated the ancestors of the Amah Mutsun to Mission San Juan Bautista, Juristac was the setting for ceremonial gatherings led by powerful shamans who resided in the hills, Ketchum says. After their Mission-era internment ended in the 1830s, Amah Mutsun healers would return to the area to collect medicinal herbs.
“Juristac was considered an area of strong medicine, and it was revered,” Ketchum says, adding that the tribe was further dispossessed of the land (known in the 1830s as Rancho Juristac) despite the fact that “there were still [Amah Mutsun] people living in or near the Sargent property.”
Some Mutsun people continued to work at the ranch, which the outgoing missionaries gave away as a Mexican land grant before the property was broken up and sold to American businessmen during the Gold Rush of the 1850s, a period marred by toothless treaties and state-sanctioned violence against Indigenous people in Northern California. Despite the tribe’s inexorable connection to the area, the ranch property had been off-limits to tribal members for generations prior to the land purchase by POST. Now, the Amah Mutsun will have increased access to the property, and groups of tribal members have walked the grounds recently. (Ketchum said he has seen a bald eagle and several golden eagles flying over the ranch recently, and he hopes that the California condor will soon return to the area.)
“We’re in the process of identifying all the tribal resources on this large piece of property, and rediscovering the areas where ceremonies were taking place,” says Ketchum, who served as a tribal historian and councilmember before becoming chairman last year. The Amah Mutsun are also regaining access to a unique geological feature and cultural site near a creek, where viscous asphalt emerges from underground deposits to form a series of small tar seeps.
Hoping for ownership
Moving forward, POST plans to collaborate with the tribal band and the Amah Mutsun Land Trust on ways to restore the tribe’s connection to the land, though details regarding the long-term stewardship of the property remain undecided. Amah Mutsun Land Trust executive director Noelle Chambers says the 11-year-old organization is working with POST on a memorandum of understanding that will define their future collaboration.
“POST is committed to working with us on the future of the property, and right now we’re working on coordinating access to the tribal community, which is a really huge moment because they have not had the ability to be on that really sacred land for a long time,” Chambers says.
While the possible options for greater tribal involvement include a conservation easement on a portion of the land, Ketchum says the tribe’s hope is to one day take ownership of some part of the property. To achieve that goal, the tribe will have to “work hard to demonstrate that we can steward this land in the future,” he says. The Amah Mutsun Land Trust is already managing a 50-acre parcel just south of Highway 129, on land donated by the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County last year.
On the future potential for a similar land transfer between POST and the tribal land trust, Clark says his organization’s focus to this point has been on securing the land for protection, and that it can now shift to having discussions with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust—as well as POST’s other partner organizations—on “what a vision for the property could look like.”
POST has commitments in place to acquire the remaining 480 acres of Sargent Ranch later this year. That site contains a series of oil wells that are currently being decommissioned according to state standards, Clark says. In October 2024, POST made an initial purchase of 1,340 acres on the adjacent Pescadero Ranch, before buying another 2,490 acres at Sargent Ranch in May 2025. Combined with the January purchase, the organization has spent more than $63 million to conserve the properties, which represents the largest investment ever made by the nearly 50-year-old organization.
“Taken in concert with our efforts to partner with other conservation groups and agencies in the region, I think there’s a lot of potential to form a robust network of protected lands in that geography,” Clark says. “So we’re quite excited about the natural resources in the property, the connectivity that the property provides, as well as the significance of the property to the tribe and the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.”
