A mild maritime climate, a coastal mountain range, and wild rivers define our region.  Cool air from the Pacific brushes the coast with generous rainfall, nurturing dense coniferous forests and rising to the oak-peppered bald prarie hills at the foot of the Klamath knot of mountains.  Veins of creeks and rivers carry the pacific moisture back to the rugged coast, through raging canyons and wide river deltas.  Entirely, it offers community - as habitat for a vast mosaic of wildlife, living among an inspired people.

NRLT is a regional organization with a large, tri-county area of interest - Humboldt, Del Norte and Trinity Counties - which together make up nearly five million acres of land.  Of these three counties a respective 50%, 75%, and 90% of the resource land bases are publicly owned.  Presently there are six community-focused land trusts operating within limited geographic areas in the region, but more than 90% of the private regional landscape and most of the towns and communities are not served by these organizations. Although countywide land trusts, quasi-governmental open-space districts and county agencies provide open space protection services in other areas of California, the North Coast previously lacked regional communication, collaboration and options for land trust services in our region. NRLT was established to fill this void and create a central organization representing our regional interests and efforts at the state and national levels.

For the last two years, NRLT's founding member and previous Board President David McMurray has been an active member of the steering committee of the California Council of Land Trusts (CCLT). The CCLT is a statewide organization formed in 2004 to represent land trusts from across the state in Sacramento and to develop open space protection policies at the state and national level. In addition to NRLT, steering committee members include the Bay Area Open Space Council, Peninsula Open Space Trust, Elkhorn Slough Foundation, Land Trust of Napa County, Shasta Land Trust, and Sierra-Cascade Land Trust. NRLT is an active, current member of the Association, with two staff participating in the development of a Northern Region Council. NRLT has been very active in coordinating the Northern Region Council Steering Committee, and we represent the entire northwest part of the state, including the counties of Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte, Siskiyou, and portions of Shasta and Modoc.