Press Room

The Marin Regional Forest Health Strategy is the latest in a series of studies going back to One Tam’s Peak Health inventory of 2016, and the first to look beyond the greater Mount Tamalpais area to cover the entirety of Marin, including private lands. KneeDeep Times, "the Bay Area's climate resilience magazine," investigates.

October 26, 2023 marked 50 years of tourists visiting Alcatraz Island, the notorious former maximum security federal prison-turned-national park. NBC Bay Area got an insider's vantage point from Jolene Babyak, a Bay Area author who was raised on the island while her father worked at the prison.

The former federal prison at Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay marks 50 years as part of the National Park System on Thursday, October 26, 2023.

To mark 50 years of Alcatraz Island being opened to the public, the National Park Service with the Parks Conservancy and Alcatraz City Cruises hosted a celebration on the island.

Alcatraz has so many layers of history: military base, federal prison, site of Native resistance, bird sanctuary. The 22-acre island in the San Francisco Bay continues to generate speculation and ink, creativity and reflection.

For nearly 40 years, the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory at the Parks Conservancy has collaborated with the National Parks Service to track the migratory patterns of these birds – collectively known as raptors – with the mission of inspiring their preservation throughout California.

Sutro Lands End Partners, LLC has been awarded a 20-year lease for the former Cliff House restaurant space, which is inside Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The partners will revive the space as well as the café inside the Lands End Visitors Center operated by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

A task force commissioned by Gov. Newsom has unveiled a new online tool that it says will provide a first-of-its-kind map showing all forest and fire prevention work completed in California. “The dashboard that the task force has developed is very much in line with the types of tools we’ve been developing regionally to support cross-jurisdictional and landscape-level projects,” Danny Franco, senior project manager with the Parks Conservancy, said.

Nicki Phelps, Vice President of Visitor Programs and Services at the Parks Conservancy, was the recepient of the 2022 James V. Murfin Award for Cooperating Associations and Partnerships which recognizes individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to improve and strengthen the 100-year partnership between the National Park Service and cooperating associations.

The main entrance to Muir Woods, which features the Muir Woods Visitor Center, is on Muir Woods Road — a winding road down to the valley floor from Panoramic Highway above. While you do need a Muir Woods parking reservation if you want to park your car in the lot at the entrance, you don't need a reservation to actually enter Muir Woods.

At the Presidio Nursery, Parks Conservancy staff raise trees and other native plants from samples collected in the Presidio. When they grow, these plants provide natural habitat for local pollinators, making it possible for more insects to thrive and birds to nest, making the Presidio's ecosystem more resilient to climate change.

Marin County is set to begin a $3 million project this summer to overhaul trails and repair environmental damage caused by decades of visitation at one of the country’s few remaining old-growth redwood groves. About half of the project funding is from a California State Parks grant. The project is part of the One Tam collaboration of public agencies with support from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy nonprofit group.