Preserving 100,000 acres in the Sierra
By Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News
TRUCKEE — In the 1860s, Congress created a huge checkerboard of land ownership across California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range when it granted every other square mile to railroad barons along the route of the transcontinental railroad.
Now, nearly 150 years later, one of Silicon Valley’s most high-profile couples is working to buy back the squares for nature.
Jim and Becky Morgan of Los Altos Hills — he, the retired CEO of Applied Materials and she, a former Santa Clara County supervisor and Republican state senator — have launched an ambitious project to raise $100 million in the next five years to preserve land across the Sierra.