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Port Angeles, WA 98362
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Retired Park Ranger Protects Property

Habitat and history are among qualities of land protected permanently through a recently completed legal agreement between the Land Trust and landowner Chiggers Stokes. The Flying S Ranch, is in western Jefferson County where coho salmon use a tributary of the Bogachiel, Roosevelt elk graze, and bears consume windfall apples.

“Incredible” is one word the Land Trust’s Conservation Director, Michele d’Hemecourt, uses to describe the recently protected property. “This was one of the first projects I worked on with NOLT, and it has been such a pleasure,” she said. “Chiggers is very conservation-minded and has loved that land since he bought it. And the land has great value to the community. NOLT is preserving the rich history, and the wildlife habitat and open space that makes our Peninsula such an appealing place to live.”

She said this is the first property in Jefferson County to receive project through a NOLT conservation easement. “Jefferson Land Trust does outstanding work, but NOLT is located closer to the property, so that organization has agreed it makes more sense for us to provide the ongoing stewardship and monitoring a conservation easement requires than for representatives of that organization to travel so far,” she said.

The property owner also cherishes the land’s history, including a portion of the Pacific Trail, also known as the Iron Man Trail, which crosses the property and still is visible under the vegetation.“It was located at the intersection of a trail going upstream along the Bogachiel River, accessing the homestead of the first white settler to this area, Chris Morgenroth, and the Iron Man Trail,” Stokes said. Stokes said the Iron Man Trail got its name from another pioneer, John Huelsdonk, who built it and earned his Iron Man of the Hoh name after he walked across the property, carrying a woodstove on his back.

Stokes’ own interest in protecting natural and historic qualities of land has deep roots. He worked for the National Park Service as a Resource Educator at the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historic Park and worked as a protection ranger in Olympic National Park from 1977 until he retired in 2000.

Stokes has lived on the land since 1978, where he operates what he calls a “bed and almost breakfast,” writes a weekly newspaper column for the Forks Forum and has completed two published novels that are available from area libraries, Between Forks and Alpha Centauri and Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Two. He maintains a Web site, www.chiggersstokes.com, where postings include his weekly columns in the Forks Forum.

Stokes’ own work as a modern day pioneer is evidenced by three homes he’s built on the property and the energy system which powers them, using water from Hemp Hill Creek, a tributary of the Bogachiel River. As important to Stokes as the power the stream provides, is the enhanced habitat for young salmon created through a collaborative project with the State Department of Fish and Wildlife, Quileute Tribe and State Department of Ecology. “Young salmon can find protected backwaters in the rearing ponds and channels we built as part of the microhydroelectric system, Stokes said.

Stokes donated the property’s development rights for the agreement. “We are not asking for anything in return except for help in protecting this land,” he wrote to the Land Trust. A grant from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Landowner Incentive Program paid costs related to the legal agreement. The program is intended to help protect federally listed or proposed endangered or threatened species or those considered to be at risk on private lands and to provide technical and financial assistance to assist in habitat protection and restoration.