Ventana Wilderness Alliance A Non Profit California Corporation

Trail program: maintaining public access to the 300-mile network of trails in the rugged ventana region has always been a significant challenge. Landscape level wildfires in recent years include the 2016 soberanes fire and the 2020 dolan fire. Each of these conflagrations torched over 100,000 acres of the ventana wildeness and damaged over 100 miles of trails. Post-fire winter storms decimate roads leading totrailheads limiting the ability of volunteer and contract crews to restore trails equally damaged by erosion, debris flows, and deadfalls. Despite these major setbacks, the vwa trail program continued to contribute thousands of volunteer crew hours in 2024 to maintain and reconstruct prioritized sections of trail in the ventana and silver peak wilderness areas.

Advocacy: vwa advocates for wilderness values and the ecologically sensitive management of public lands in the ventana and big sur regions. Policy experts analyze and respond to the us forest service schedule of proposed actions (sopa) by attending planning and scoping meetings, providing comments, and encouraging participation by the public and other stakeholders. The vwa's advocacy programs included efforts to expand wilderness and wild and scenic river designations, monitoring grazing allotments to ensure regulatory compliance, promoting approprate fuels and wildfire management strategies, identifying and encouraging the mitigation of wilderness incursions, educating the public about wilderness, and advocating for the restoration of federal funding to critical public land agencies.

Volunteer wilderness ranger program: since the federal government does not prioritize or properly fund the us forest service to manage wildnerness, vwa steps to the challenge with a program that puts volunteer wilderness rangers in the back country. Volunteers patrol trails and camps and perform campsite maintenance while imparting fire safety and leave no trace information to the visiting public. In 2024 rangers donated thousands of service hours by cleaning camp sites, removing trash, and imparting leave no trace principles through direct contact with visitors. Each year, volunteer wilderness rangers make an in-kind contribution to public lands worth tens of thousands of dollars to the community.