McKenzie River Trust purchases small oceanside parcel south of Yachats, will transfer it to tribe

By QUINTON SMITH/Lincoln Chronicle

YACHATS – A Eugene-based land conservation nonprofit has purchased a seven-acre oceanfront parcel south of Yachats to preserve it from potential – but difficult — development.

The McKenzie River Trust closed the $120,000 purchase Friday and within weeks plans to turn the property over to the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, said Margaret Treadwell, the trust’s central coast conservation manager.

The parcel is a steep, rocky and brush-filled and mostly inaccessible site that lays between U.S. Highway 101 and the ocean.

Siletz tribal council member Robert Kentta announced the trust’s purchase and gift to the tribe Saturday night during a fundraising event for the Yachats land conservation group View the Future. View the Future contributed $55,000 toward the purchase. Others contributing to the purchase included the Nature Conservancy, Friends of Otter Rock Marine Reserve, the Cape Perpetua Collaborative, and private donors, Treadwell said.

Treadwell said the landowners had studied the possibility of developing the parcel for housing “and eventually came to the conclusion that it was not developable.” The owners contacted the trust last December to inquire if it wanted to buy the property, which began the evaluation, purchase and transfer process.

Treadwell said the trust reached out to the Siletz and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians to gauge their interest in accepting the land and that the Coos Bay-based tribe deferred to the Siletz. It will be managed for conservation and education, she said.

It is the McKenzie Trust’s second collaboration in Lincoln County with the Siletz tribe. In 2022 the trust acquired 27 acres of land on Cape Foulweather north of Newport and then sold it to the tribe in 2024, which used a federal grant to purchase the land which was once part of its reservation.

“The work we do with the tribes is some of the most meaningful,” she said.

Founded in 1989, the Eugene-based trust’s objective is to preserve and rehabilitate land and rivers in western Oregon and has been working in Lincoln County since 2021. In addition to the Cape Foulweather project, Treadwell said its other land purchases have been near Schooner Creek, Siletz Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Collins Creek and in Seal Rock.

Saturday fundraiser

Kentta made the purchase announcement Saturday night during an emotional talk and review of the tribe’s history on the coast during View the Future’s first fundraising dinner and auction.

Through silent and oral auctions and yearly or monthly pledges, the event at the Yachats Commons raised $101,000 for the nonprofit’s operations, said executive director Gretchen Dubie. Some 125 people bought tickets and 37 volunteers helped with the event.

The evening featured a presentation by Amy Bowers Cordalis, an author, attorney and Yurok tribal leader who talked about the tribe’s fight to help remove four PacifiCorp dams on the Klamath River in northern California. Two years after the last dam was taken down, Chinook salmon are already returning hundreds of miles upstream.

“When we work with nature, it works with us,” she told the audience.

• Quinton Smith is the editor of Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at [email protected]