Centennial/Dressler
Ranch
Mono
County
Linking national, wilderness and private lands
Located in the pristine Bridgeport
Valley on the east slope of the
Central Sierra Nevada, the historic 6,350-acre Centennial/Dressler Ranch is one
of the last remaining undeveloped mountain valleys in California. The Centennial/Dressler Ranch
contains the largest wetland complex along the Eastern Sierra, created largely
through irrigation. By permanently preserving this property as rangeland and
ensuring continued historical irrigation and management practices, the
conservation easement will protect miles of riparian areas along the East Walker
River and Robinson,
Buckeye and By Day Creeks.The easement
preserves intact habitat for Mono sage grouse, raptors, and the
state-threatened wolverine.It also
protects a critical deer migration corridor, offering permanent protection of
the migration corridor from Yosemite and the Hoover Wilderness to the Sweetwater Mountains andthe drier, warmer areas to the east. This corridor provides continuous links in
wildlife habitat encompassing hundreds of thousands of acres—an expansive
accomplishment which exists in few places in the West. The conservation
easement is a landscape protection project unequalled in size in the Eastern
Sierra region. The American Land Conservancy partnered with Centennial
Livestock owners Wood & Lacey and California Rangeland Trust in this
important conservation easement transaction.Major contributors to the project included the California Wildlife
Conservation Board and the California Department of Transportation.