Aerial photo of the mouth of Chimacum Creek by John Gussman. Photo courtesy of the Jefferson County Conservation Futures Fund program, which has provided funding to protect many properties in this area.
Land conservation is at the heart of what we do. Working with our community, Jefferson Land Trust has helped protect nearly 19,000 acres of our region’s iconic forests, waterways, farmland, coastlines, wildlife habitat, and open spaces — forever.
Here’s a quick recap of some of our important 2025 conservation milestones.
Pileated Woodpecker in Quimper Wildlife Corridor. Photo by Wendy Feltham.
Since 1992, the Land Trust has worked with willing landowners, the City of Port Townsend, Jefferson County, and others to address increasing development pressures and protect properties that border trails, wetlands, and critical wildlife habitat within one of our oldest and most beloved project areas: the Quimper Wildlife Corridor.
In 2025, we protected five additional properties totaling 4.78 acres, bringing the total amount of land permanently protected in the corridor to 331 acres. With continued community support, we’ll keep working with interested landowners to protect more land that protects the trails, wetlands, and forest habitat of the corridor in the years to come.
We also continued investing in the Chimacum Creek watershed, which has been the focus of significant community salmon recovery efforts for nearly four decades.
Fun fact: the Land Trust’s very first conservation easement in 1991 was on land lying along the creek, and our first land purchase was on a nearby creekside property! Since then, we’ve permanently protected more than 2,500 acres to support local farms, forests, and fish and wildlife habitat in this important watershed.
A Washington Conservation Corps (WCC) crew helping complete the first .2 miles of the multi-use trail at Chimacum Ridge Community Forest in April 2025.
An exciting milestone in 2025 was the public opening of 918-acre Chimacum Ridge Community Forest, which includes a number of tributaries — both seasonal and year-round — that feed into Chimacum Creek. Now owned by a subsidiary of the Land Trust and overseen by a volunteer board of managers, this new community forest offers a balance of ecological, economic, educational, and recreational benefits.
Also in the Chimacum Creek watershed is a property we call Chimacum Commons. It was acquired by the Land Trust in 2014 with a threefold vision: to protect productive farmland, restore salmon habitat along Chimacum Creek, and create a pathway for affordable farmworker housing on a portion of the land. During 2025, we made some great progress on our long-held desire to support our farming community with a local housing solution. Thanks to a $197,500 grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce, the Land Trust and our partners at Olympic Housing Trust were able to undertake predevelopment planning for permanently affordable farm- and food-system worker housing — helping move the project from one that’s merely conceptual toward one that’s shovel-ready.
Since 2002, we’ve joined more than 40 local organizations in a large-scale effort to permanently protect land in the Tarboo Creek watershed near Quilcene. The forests, streams, and wetlands of the area provide critical habitat for salmon and other wildlife, and Dabob Bay is one of the most productive estuaries in all of Hood Canal.
In 2025, working with longtime partner Northwest Watershed Institute (NWI), willing landowners, and others, we helped protect two additional properties totaling 177 acres:
We’ve also got a healthy list of exciting potential conservation efforts ahead in 2026. We’re working with a number of willing landowners to protect more local farms, forests, and fish and wildlife habitat, including additional property along Chimacum Creek and in the Quimper Wildlife Corridor.
