Centennial/Dressler Ranch

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 and the 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 only in a few places in the West. The conservation easement is a landscape protection project unequaled in size in the Eastern Sierra region. The American Land Conservancy partnered with Centennial Livestock owners, and California Rangeland Trust on this important conservation easement transaction.  Major contributors to the project included the California Wildlife Conservation Board and the California Department of Transportation.