Save Mount Diablo has completed the largest fundraising campaign in the organization’s 50-year history, reaching a $15 million goal to preserve a total of more than two square miles of land on the mountain.

By hitting its fundraising target, the group will protect 1,681 acres across nine properties surrounding the mountain’s North Peak, which has an elevation of about 3,500 feet. The campaign will ensure the land is never developed or populated with buildings, though visitors will be allowed on some of the acquired lands through the education initiative Discover Diablo, the organization’s executive director said.

Discover Diablo is a community hiking program.

The fundraising campaign, named “Forever Wild,” began in 2013 on top of Save Mount Diablo’s existing fundraising efforts. From the outset, the mission was an intensified version of the group’s founding ethos in 1971 — protecting the scenic mountain from developers.

“Our founders understood that the Bay Area would only continue to grow more and more, that there would be pressures for development on our critical open-space lands,” said Ted Clement, the group’s executive director, in an interview. “The Forever Wild capital campaign we just completed was thankfully our greatest success.”

About two-thirds of the revenue will go toward land purchases and other conservation efforts, Clement said. The other portion will go toward any legal defense that Save Mount Diablo may need in the future, as well as a “stewardship endowment fund,” which Clement said will pay for future habitat restoration work, wildfire risk abatement and other measures to keep the land healthy.

A diagram of the land conserved as part of Save Mount Diablo’s “Forever Wild” campaign. (Courtesy of Save Mount Diablo) 

The organization has not yet tapped any of the money in the stewardship endowment fund, part of a conservative approach intended for the fund to accrue meaningful interest, he added. When the fund reaches about $3 million, the group will begin paying for restorative projects.

Save Mount Diablo acquired most of the land preserved as part of the Forever Wild campaign. But the most recent property involved will remain under the ownership of Concord Mount Diablo Trail Ride Association, an equestrian group based in Clayton.

The association’s land spans 154 acres of sloped, rugged terrain in a high-country area of the mountain, and cost Save Mount Diablo about $1 million of its fundraising revenue to preserve.

Instead of negotiating a land transfer, the two groups in late 2019 signed on to a conservation easement, which is a state-protected legal agreement ensuring that neither industrial nor residential uses can ever find their way to the property.

The conservation easement was prompted when Save Mount Diablo noticed that the trail ride association had built about 15 houses on another nearby parcel — an example, Clement said, of how residential development can make its way even to the most rural spots.

He added that the trail ride association’s leadership board was receptive to preserving the land and an enthusiastic partner in the agreement. Members of that organization could not be reached for comment.

“It takes two to tango,” Clement said of the other land Save Mount Diablo has preserved via purchases. “You need a willing landowner to do a land acquisition with.”

The other properties preserved as part of the Forever Wild campaign include the 105-acre Highland Springs, the 95-acre Anderson Ranch and the 87-acre North Peak Ranch. But the campaign’s most ambitious acquisition — and Save Mount Diablo’s largest to date — was the Curry Canyon Ranch, a sprawling 1,080-acre valley that the organization purchased for $7 million in 2015.