The elephant seal colony at Drakes Bay.Despite growing awareness of the environmental damage the cattle operations were wreaking on the peninsula, they granted new permits, turning their backs on the park’s ecological and natural resources and, arguably, on the institution’s mission to “preserve unimpaired … natural and cultural resources … for future generations.” To keep them from becoming a nuisance to the ranchers (and to better monitor their populations), the elk were held captive at Tomales Point. But by the time they did, the Park Service was cash-strapped. In the original plans, the leases were set to expire between 19, according to Chance Cutrano, director of programs at the Resource Renewal Institute. By then, the peninsula had been designated a national seashore, a process during which the National Park Service purchased the original ranch and dairy lands and leased them back to their previous owners under special use permits.
In 1978, they were finally returned to Point Reyes. Over the next century, conservationists worked to slowly rebuild tule elk populations, transplanting small herds to different public and private lands within the species’ original territory. Just one herd remained: A tiny group of 20 animals on a private ranch near Bakersfield. They once ranged from the southern Central Valley to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in the east and up to Mount Shasta in the north, before they were hunted to near extinction for their meat, lard, and hides. In those early days, tule elk had all but disappeared from the peninsula. Point Reyes’ ranches and dairies date back to the 1850s when they were first established to provide butter and steak to the booming population of San Francisco, 40 miles to the south. Tule elk relax on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean. Deer frolic on the hillsides and three separate pairs of coyotes slip quietly along the fence lines as I make my way past G Ranch, F Ranch, E Ranch, and on through the alphabet to the headlands where just offshore, gray whales migrate south to warmer waters. It’s morning and the memories of yesterday’s stormy skies at Tomales Point are vanquished by the cheery sunlight. I don’t pass many cars on the way to the lighthouse. “They’ve eliminated diverse native coastal prairies from 90 percent of the park.” The elk at Limantour and Drakes beaches can survive on what’s left, but they must compete with the cattle to do so. “The cows have basically replaced whole ecosystems,” says Laura Cunningham, California director of the Western Watersheds Project. Point Reyes National Seashore is one of only a few national park units that has allowed historic ranches and dairies to continue to work within its bounds and, along with them, more than 5,000 cows trample the soil and smother the pastures with their manure. What caused the degradation is no mystery. A rainbow dances above the hiking trail to Tomales Point. The blanket of emerald vegetation is a blanket of weeds. The landscape may look lush at 50 mph but there is little prairie junegrass and wild rye left here. The road to the Point Reyes Lighthouse is rough but the hills outside my car window, made green by winter rains, create smooth waves across the horizon. Despite being a national park site, Point Reyes is a key battleground for the future of conservation in California and at its center, the tule elk roam.
The two smaller herds live in freedom at Limantour and Drakes beaches, but no one knows for exactly how long. Though three herds of tule elk live in the park today, only the captive one on this narrow rocky peninsula at Tomales Point resembles what once was. Two hundred years ago, the prairies and meadows of Point Reyes National Seashore were teeming with these shaggy ungulates, a subspecies of elk found only in California. As I hike five miles toward the peninsula’s abrupt end at Tomales Point, tule elk lounge on the bluffs, their antlers glinting in the dappled light. The forecast promises rain but the skies that darken above Northern California’s Tomales Bay bring only rainbows, dancing elegantly over the trail.