The Return

The land that used to be called Hershey Ranch stretches high into the foothills of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, bordering Giant Sequoia National Monument. Covering 14,673 acres, it holds the waters of Deer Creek, the only major undammed stream in the region, which meanders through the low places of the valley, crowded on each bank with California sycamore (Platanus racemosa), willow (Salix spp.), and cottonwood (Populus fremontii) trees that paint the autumn gold. From the highest reaches of the land you can see giant sequoias peeking over the ridgetops. Once, cattle grazed here. Soon, Tule elk will wander the grassland, browsing purple needlegrass (Stipa pulchra).

What does it feel like to walk these hills? “Like home,” says Tule River Tribal Chairman Shine Nieto. “Like coming home.”

Last October, Nieto and the rest of the Tule River Tribe celebrated Hershey Ranch’s return to their tribal sovereignty, accompanied by a renaming that honored its historic roots: the Yowlumne Hills. Coordinated in partnership with CNPS, The Conservation Fund,  the state’s Wildlife Conservation Board, and the California Natural Resources Agency’s Tribal Nature-Based Solutions Program (which uses state dollars to fund the return of ancestral land to tribes), this return marked the close of a project that has been generations in the making. Part of the state’s 30×30 initiative to conserve 30% of California’s lands and coastal waters by 2030, Yowlumne Hills expands the Tule River Tribe’s land holdings to more than 72,000 adjoining acres, enabling the tribe to take on critical conservation efforts like flood protection, the creation of a nursery for native food and medicinal plants, and the reintroduction of native animal species.

While the tribe once inhabited land stretching from the Coast Range mountains to the west and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east, the Yowlumne Hills themselves are of particular historic, ecological, and sentimental value to the Tule River People. The mountains in the Yowlumne Hills are scattered with grinding stones that tribal ancestors used to process the acorn flour that formed a staple of their diet—a sign of the longevity of their relationship with this land. The area also contains burial sites and other places of cultural and sacred importance, which tribal members said they were eager to have restored to their stewardship. “Our territory was bigger than Los Angeles and all the communities around it, mountain range to mountain range,” Nieto says. “We were 3 million people strong, pre-contact [with settlers]. We’ve been here a long time.”   

The Hershey Ranch parcel is adjacent to the Tule River Reservation, running alongside the protected land of the Giant Sequoia National Monument. Alongside a smaller property called the Carothers Ranch, the acquisition of this parcel means conserving a continuous landscape of ecological and botanical diversity.

The restoration of the Yowlumne Hills to tribal sovereignty has been generations in the making. “These were ancestral lands, and their return to us was originally promised as part of the 1851 Painted Creek Treaty,” says Vern Vera, Tule River tribal elder and former member of the Tribal Council. Although signed, the treaty was never ratified by the federal government, leaving the land in limbo and allowing it to be reclaimed by non-native stakeholders over and over again for more than a century. The tribe was forcibly relocated multiple times over the years, subject to the whims of a government that moved them at its convenience. It was an existence that Nieto described as precarious. “We’re basically on our fourth reservation,” he says. “We did the Thanksgiving thing, farmed the land for them, got it all good—and then they moved us.” After generations of having other people manage their relationship to ancestral land, the Tule River Tribe was determined to get as much territory as possible back under its control.

Hershey Ranch came on the market in 2023, when the ranching family who had owned it for the past decade decided it was time to move on. Their 40,000-acre home ranch was located about 20 miles away in neighboring Springville, with additional properties in the Central Valley, and the family decided that it was too much trouble to manage the smaller property, hauling cattle trailers back and forth across the muddy, winding roads.   

Thanks to its remoteness and the steepness of the terrain, the ranch land had been relatively well preserved over time. “There is so little protected land in this area, because so much of the valley floor has been converted to agriculture,” says Barbara Brydolf, a retired biologist and the president and conservation chair of the CNPS Alta Peak Chapter. Brydolf says she was impressed by how intact the Hershey Ranch property was on an initial tour in May 2023. “There’s chaparral,” Brydolf adds. “There’s quite a bit of riparian vegetation because there’s so many streams through that land, many of which are perennial, but some of which are seasonal. So there is a lot of diversity, and it was in great shape.”

For the tribe, the appeal of reclaiming Hershey Ranch was clear. Securing the ranch would maintain a critical throughway for native species and preserve vital cultural sites that they had been unable to access for years. There was even a road connecting the property to the existing Tule River Reservation, although at the time a locked gate blocked the tribe from entering. Acquiring the ranch meant opening the gate, both for vital native species and for tribal members who could once more access the land for hunting and other traditional practices, including the gathering of native plants for crafts like basketweaving, medicinal, and culinary use.

With no advance notice of the sale and an original listing price of $14.5 million for the Hershey Ranch, the tribe sought funding options on an expedited timeline before the property could be sold to anyone else. The idea of obtaining a grant to purchase the ranch came from Brydolf, who first connected with the Tule River Tribe when she was volunteering as a regional leader with the statewide Power in Nature coalition. Through her work with the coalition, Brydolf had learned about the state’s innovative Tribal Nature-Based Solutions Program, a $100 million grant program to support the return of ancestral lands to tribal ownership and stewardship across California. Brydolf had begun working on a project to reclaim a parcel of land in nearby Porterville called the Yaudanchi Ecological Reserve, which had been decommissioned and closed to the public. Brydolf approached the Tribe about developing a land-return grant for the reserve, but the project stalled out.   

Around this time, Brydolf’s husband happened to mention to her that Hershey Ranch was on the market. Brydolf passed along the listing to the Tule River Tribe, which immediately recognized an opportunity to secure the return of its historic land. However, the prospect wasn’t as simple as acquiring a single piece of property. If the tribe was going to create the uninterrupted throughway it had envisioned for the passage of native wildlife and flourishing of native plants, it also needed to secure a smaller, 2,300-acre property called the Carothers Ranch, which carved out a sort of “doughnut hole” between the Hershey Ranch and the Tule River Tribe Reservation.   

That’s where Ben Fryer, a senior field representative with The Conservation Fund, stepped in. A national nonprofit with a dual charter of land conservation and economic sustainability, The Conservation Fund works on behalf of partners including public agencies, other land trusts, and an increasing number of tribal organizations to support the purchases of high-priority properties they lack resources to acquire on their own. Geneva E.B. Thompson, the Deputy Secretary for Tribal Affairs with the California Natural Resources Agency, connected the Tule River Tribe with The Conservation Fund: An attorney by training with a background in forestry, Fryer had worked with Thompson’s agency and the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Humboldt County on a 10,000-acre land-return effort in 2023. That collaboration marked the inaugural project for Tribal Nature-Based Solutions grant program—the same program that would go on to help fund the Yowlumne Hills land return.

When Fryer’s team mapped Hershey Ranch, the Carothers Ranch property immediately jumped out as critical to their acquisition. Bringing the property under tribal ownership was essential not only for connectivity, but also to prevent the land from going into incompatible use. For instance, if someone picked it up as a recreational property and overhunted it, it could undermine the preservation programs on both tribal reservation land and the newly acquired ranch property.   

The team hit a stroke of good luck in the form of ranch owner Buck Carothers. “I approached Vern Vera to see if he knew anything about the ranch, and he shared that Buck was a tribal member,” Fryer says. Carothers was open to selling: In his 60s, he was ready to move to a more manageable ranch. “It’s pretty rough country up there, and it can be hard to locate cattle,” Fryer adds. “They know how to hide.” Carothers wanted to relocate his herd, which meant The Conservation Fund needed to allow an unusually flexible timeline that allowed him to close whenever he found another property. “This speaks to what our organization does,” Fryer says. “We try to craft a transaction that works with our sellers as well as the various organizations we’re pulling funding from.”

At the time of the sale, the appraised fair market value of the ranch was $17.7 million. Drawing on grants from the Tribal Nature-Based Solutions Program and the Wildlife Conservation Board (a key California state agency that funds and approves projects focused on habitat protection, restoration, and public access), as well as private grant funding, The Conservation Fund was able to facilitate the sale of the Hershey and Carothers ranches for no net cost to the Tule River Tribe. Additional private grant funding was secured to support the tribe’s stewardship of the land.

“I think this is an example of what real partnership can look like between tribes, nonprofits, public agencies, and the philanthropic sector,” Fryer says. “I think it’s a standout example of what is possible. It shows people that these programs and partnerships really do work.”

At the end of October, the Tule River People welcomed around 300 people to a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the official return of the Yowlumne Hills to their tribe. Vera recalls perfect weather as speakers ranging from local supporters to state and federal representatives spoke to the moment. Tribal members sang and danced a blessing for the land as the crowd joined together in celebration. “It was a strong feeling,” Vera says. “It was great.”

The first major milestone in the current era of state-aided land return came in 2023, when over 40 acres of the Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery were restored to the Fort Independence Indian Community in Inyo County. In May 2025, a years-long effort in Northern California culminated in the final stage of conveying 47,000 acres along the Klamath River to the Yurok Tribe—the largest land-back conservation deal in state history.

The Yowlumne Hills transaction marks the initiative’s latest success. Nieto and Vera both cite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s historic commitment to land-back projects, which made it possible for the Tule River Tribe and others to act quickly and decisively to make the purchases that restored ancestral lands to tribal stewardship. Nieto expressed his excitement about returning the land to its original state, restoring a thriving landscape of native species after generations of use as a cattle ranch. The tribe plans to reintroduce native animal species like the North American beaver as well as undertake native vegetation restoration. “Part of the process is trying to do away with some of that damage,” Nieto says. “We reintroduced the beaver to try to bring back water where the aquifers were. We wanted to bring the Tule elk home because that’s part of our lifestyle. That provided our clothing and our tools and meat, of course.”

Reintroducing native plants is of vital cultural importance as well, and a particular area of focus for Vern Vera. “We have a group of elder women up here who do California basketmaking as part of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association,” says Vera, who also previously served as the tribe’s former director of planning and community development. “They need to have access to redbud trees for their work, so we’re looking to find some of those and plant them, as well as some of the medicinal plants, like sage and wormwood, and the edible plants that used to be here a long time ago, like clover.” Vera has been working to identify areas where native plants would thrive, as well as establish a native nursery by the old Hershey farmhouse.

Brydolf recorded a staggering array of native plant species on her initial visit to the property, including a native California oak-woodland system, which is both ecologically critical and increasingly under threat from development, land conversion, fire, drought, and the spread of invasive species. According to the U.S. Forest Service’s Oaks 2040 Report, California has lost more than a million acres of oak woodlands over recent decades, with some experts estimating that up to 750,000 more acres may be at risk by 2040. Yowlumne Hills represents a critical and diverse slice of this at-risk ecosystem. “Elevational diversity drives ecological diversity,” Fryer says. “There are so many different temperature gradients in the Yowlumne Hills, different aspects in terms of the slope of the hills themselves or what direction they face. You can see a whole slice of ecological and botanical diversity and habitat types in a really short stretch east to west.”

While the preservation of this vital stretch of land is a victory in and of itself, tribal elders say they hope their acquisition of the Yowlumne Hills will inspire additional efforts by other regional tribes to reclaim their ancestral lands.

“We’ve been working together with the Tachis and Tubatulabals, since this combined area belonged to all our people,” Nieto says. “We reached out to them and said, ‘Hey, this is not only about Tule River—it’s about you, too.’” Both tribes are currently working with Vera and Brydolf to get land back into their own management. “This particular land-back effort is part of a larger network of tribes in the surrounding areas,” Vera adds. “It’s beautiful.”

For Nieto, the return of the land at Yowlumne Hills is about the Tule River People—past and future—as much as it is about the California tribal community as a whole. “I want to imagine what my grandma and all my elders that already passed away would be thinking,” he says. “There’s a lot of things we’re doing nowadays that I feel that our elders before us would be pretty proud of.”