Planning LandPaths hut system: hut-to-hut

dedicated to hands-on land stewardship

by Sam Demas, May 2018

QUESTION: What kind of organization is planning a new hut system and is dedicated to connecting people with the land by:

• sponsoring regular trekking and kayaking trips for youth, families, and others?
• operating several community gardens and environmentally themed summer camps?
• offering workshops, classes and outings linking teens to the outdoors?
• conducting early literacy reading programs in the outdoors?
• successfully partnering with local schools, government agencies, non-profits and land owners?
• focusing efforts on working with the Latino community and offering scholarships to up to 40% of participants in their programs?

ANSWER:   LandPaths, a unique land trust in Sonoma County, California.

Over the past 22 years LandPaths’ dynamic, creative, and values-based approach to land stewardship has engendered widespread respect and tremendous community support. This is staffed by 17 consummate cooperators and operate in a wide range of partnerships. They successfully fund-raise to provide scholarships for many educational programs targeting youth from Santa Rosa and Sonoma County.  

More than most land trusts, LandPaths focuses on recruiting people of all ages and all socio-economic classes as hand-on land stewards. As a land trust, the group negotiates conservation easements, but its primary focus is hands-on programs connecting the community to open space in order to engender a shared and active ethos around stewardship.  Nevertheless, along the way, LandPaths has accumulated seven key parcels of Sonoma County open space.  These stunningly beautiful parcels — representing a range of biomes — were either donated or purchased at discount prices.  The land trust benefits from generous land owners deeply impressed by its work and who share its educational and stewardship goals. 

Today LandPaths is poised to develop a hut-to-hut system linking their own properties, and also connecting with privately owned parcels.  Focusing a system on education and hands-on stewardship activities will present a new hut-to-hut paradigm to the nation and the world.  The organization  has the potential to develop 4-6 multi-day walking and paddling routes, and a complementary curriculum.  A future Sonoma Country hut-to-hut system will introduce audiences to a range of biomes and environmental concepts, develop a sequence of outdoor skills, provide stewardship projects along the trail, and challenge users at multiple levels.

LandPaths holds its meetings outdoors, on the trail or on the river, a clear demonstration that

these folks live their values!  Laurel and I spent a week in Sonoma County recently  trekking, kayaking, visiting farms and vineyards, making presentations/stimulating discussion, and meeting lots of interesting folks excited to participate in hut-to-hut visioning.  We were hosted by the dynamic duo that runs LandPaths, Craig Anderson and Lee Hackeling.

Happy participants in the earliest stages of planning, we hope to be involved in later stages as well.  We learned that LandPaths’ strategic hut-to-hut initiative builds on their program TrekSonoma, which for the past decade has run a range of creative one-day and multi-day adventures for folks of all ages and backgrounds, from inner city kids, teens and families to high-end eco/culinary/wine-tourists.  In addition to the usual challenges in developing a hut system, Land Paths will face the fact that 95% of Sonoma County land is privately owned.  Due to years of partnership experience, the group seems well positioned to work with farmers and other private land owners to secure needed rights of access between hut sites.

Sonoma County, boasting a long history of environmental advocacy and devotion to open space preservation, provides fertile ground for the Land Path vision to flourish. The county is very rural, with numerous wineries, hundreds of small farms, the lovely Russian River, and a remarkably well-preserved 55 mile seacoast. Building blocks — a robust Open Space District, a great regional park district, and vibrant tradition of tourism/agro-tourism — are already in place.

As the initiative moves forward, LandPaths will build on Sonoma County’s natural features, history, and culture, and upholds its own strong educational and stewardship values, as they put huts in service of mission:

LandPaths’ mission is to foster a love of the land in Sonoma County. LandPaths creates ways for people to experience the beauty, understand the value, and assist in healing the land in their local communities.

Stay tuned!