A modest motorcade of a white pickup truck, a couple of dirt bikes and two side-by-sides wended its way across a network of roads before fanning out over open pastures for roundup day on the Lunny Ranch, where the 90-cow Angus-Hereford herd would be driven in from the range to the distant corrals.

The Lunnys describe roundups more like family reunions than workdays. Every available hand is conscripted, from 94-year-old Joe, the family’s patriarch, to 6-year-old Isabella, the fifth generation to learn the rhythms of ranch life.

Kevin Lunny, maneuvering over the rutted earth in his all-terrain vehicle, grips a walkie-talkie and coordinates the operation. 

“Want to look into the canyon here and make sure there’s no cows below us?” he asks his son Patrick.  

On a dirt bike, Patrick drops down into the ravine, while on the opposite end of the pasture, his sister Brigid keeps pace in a side-by-side with her husband, Jorge Mata Jr., and their longtime friend Nacho Franco. All were raised on Point Reyes ranches. 

Bringing up the rear is Kevin’s childhood friend, Jim Curtis—“Jimmy Diesel” to everyone who knows him—at the wheel of the pickup, joined by neighbor Ashley Arndt and her daughter, Emma.

Finding one group of cows mawing on needlegrass, fescue and clover beneath the spindly antennas of the Coast Guard receiver site, the crew whistles, coos and yelps until the animals are prodded into action. The cows alternate between steady walk and gentle trot in a straight-lined migration toward the corral. Several calves, their fur a chestnut brown that will later molt to umber, scurry alongside. 

The Lunny Ranch covers 1,400 acres of gently rolling hills on the Point Reyes peninsula, stretching from the Pacific and Abbotts Lagoon to one end of Drakes Estero. To the north, a mile-long colonnade of eucalyptus trees, planted in the 1870s as a windbreak, once marked the divide between the two dominant 19th-century landholdings—the Howard and Shafter estates. Nearby, nestled in a knoll of cypress and eucalyptus, lies the Historic Life-Saving Station Cemetery, where service members are buried next to generations of the Claussens, a family of pioneering dairymen.

Patrick and Joe Lunny sit with their friend Jim Curtis, unwinding after roundup day on the ranch. Mr. Curtis is among dozens who have found employment in the Lunny family businesses. (George Alfaro / Point Reyes Light)

At the corrals, the cows are sorted, and the last nine calves are vaccinated, castrated and ear-marked while their mothers mope and bellow in an adjacent pen. Nearby, Kevin’s wife, Nancy, crouches over a well-worn composition notebook, her pen scratching as she records the details of each calf with meticulous care. 

X39, a brockle-faced calf with a stout frame, is pinned down by Patrick and Nacho as Isabella leans in, spraying disinfectant. Brigid, steady and precise, administers the vaccine, then makes a quick horizontal incision near the bottom of its scrotum with a pocketknife. Finally, she punches a tag through its ear. 

Afterward, Dylan, Brigid’s 11-year-old son, tenderly picks up a newly detached testicle by its spermatic cord like a grim yoyo and flings it over the fence. 

Jorge Mata Jr. watches from a U.T.V. as Emma, Dylan, Patrick, Isabella and Teala rustle the last of the cattle into the corral. Timid calves linger on a knoll before they are tagged and vaccinated. (George Alfaro / Point Reyes Light)

“The family has always come together on roundup day,” Joe said, clutching a mug that reads, “Weird being the same age as old people.” He chuckles. “But back then, you didn’t see girls in the corral. Brigid’s different.”

Kevin, a man accustomed to working seven days a week, 365 days a year, long imagined his children and grandchildren continuing this way of life. Instead, they’re joining him during these final months of roundups and rotations, not to carry on but to pack up. They are sifting through the things accumulated over multiple lifetimes lived in the same home—dresser drawers tightly packed with clothes, an attic brimming with artifacts, shelves overburdened with household supplies—and sorting them into piles of give away, throw out and keep. 

“You go into the attic and find stuff from when you were 10, or things Dad had as a kid,” says 36-year-old Brigid. She sits at the kitchen table in her parents’ modest home, a World War II army barrack repurposed as worker housing, which Kevin and Nancy made their own after marrying. “When my grandpa’s up there, he’ll get lost down memory lane. The cleanout brings up a lot, but it’s gotta get done.”

A stone’s throw away stands the house Joe has occupied since he was 17, where he and his late wife, Joan, raised their six children, Joe, Kevin, Ginny, Chrissy, Carolyn and Bob. 

The quiet, methodical and often somber work of sorting decades of possessions—boxing up keepsakes, discarding what cannot be carried—is unfolding in homes across the Point Reyes National Seashore as the Lunnys and 10 other families prepare to close the chapter on four, five or even six generations of ranching here.

Years of closed-door mediation, spurred by a lawsuit from three environmental groups against the National Park Service, culminated in a January settlement that all but ends dairy and beef ranching on the point. The Nature Conservancy has raised an estimated $30 million to buy out the ranch leases, giving ranchers 15 months to depart. Under the terms, their homes, barns and outbuildings must be left empty and spotless before any payout is received.

Soon, thousands of cows will make their exodus from the peninsula, followed by the families that have cared for them, as the familiar tableau of ranches—part of a pastoral tradition that took root here in the mid-19th century—shrinks to a vestige of that agrarian past. Empty corrals. Silent barns. Abandoned milking parlors and toolsheds. Vacant ranch houses.

The shift will reduce the footprint of Point Reyes commercial ranching by nearly 17,000 acres and the region’s cattle population by 4,729 cows. Only 282 cows will remain within the seashore, and another 635 in the neighboring Golden Gate National Recreation Area, where ranchers have been offered 20-year leases.

Under the seashore’s updated general management plan, the park service will partner with The Nature Conservancy to oversee a targeted grazing program designed to maintain the region’s grasslands. An average of 600 cattle—capped at 1,200—will be deployed each year to manage vegetation on land long tended by human hands. Before nearly 200 years of cattle ranching, these prairies were carefully managed by the Coast Miwok, who for at least two millennia practiced controlled burns to enrich the soil and create ideal grazing and hunting grounds for deer and elk.

“They want to remove grazing because it’s bad, but they’re going to hire contract grazers because it needs to continue,” Kevin said, raising an eyebrow and shaking his head.

Negotiations over the settlement agreement remain shrouded in nondisclosure agreements, their details unlikely to come to light. But according to Kevin, the path to signing it was far from easy. 

“At first, when we heard about the Nature Conservancy’s offer, we were offended,” he said. “You can imagine all 11 families had to come to a decision at their own pace. Some wanted out immediately, some had already sold off their herds. Others said, ‘Wait a minute, we love it here. This is our home.’”

Brigid Lunny and her brother Patrick tag a young calf. The 90-head herd will be sold off in the coming months, and the family plans to depart the ranch by summer. (George Alfaro / Point Reyes Light)

Among the last to sign were the Lunnys, a family still considered newcomers to the area by Point Reyes standards. Joe, raised in San Francisco’s Ashbury Heights, was just 17 when he followed his parents, Ethel and Joe Sr., to the peninsula 78 years ago. In 1947, his father bought a rundown dairy at the Historic G ranch—though not the land itself, which belonged to Radio Corporation of America.  

Joe Sr., then vice president and general manager of Pope & Talbot, Inc.’s steamship division, “didn’t know a damn thing about ranching,” according to his son. But together, father and son transformed from city boys to cattlemen, learning the dairy business the hard way—by consulting with other dairymen and often painful trial and error. Ethel never warmed to ranch life; she longed for her comfortable city existence as she watched her black Packard rust in the brackish air. 

Since the outset, the Lunnys have never owned their land, instead operating on five-year leases. In 1977, R.C.A. sold the property to the Trust for Public Land, which briefly tried to evict the family before doubling their rent. The following year, the federal government purchased the ranch for the Point Reyes National Seashore. Unlike neighbors who had negotiated profitable buyouts in the ’60s and early ’70s, the Lunnys saw no such windfall.

Joe Sr. died in 1959, at age 61, leaving the family operation to Joan and their 28-year-old son, Joe. Far from the reluctant ranch wife, Joan milked cows, tended calves and rode into the fields with a baby crib wedged in the back of the ranch truck.

By the mid-’70s, ever-stricter water-quality rules sounded the death knell for dairies on the Point. Like other families, the Lunnys switched to beef when regulations made milking too costly. “We had the environmental people on our back all the time,” Joe Jr. recalled. 

But the beef market was volatile—it could boom one year, bust the next—leaving a ranch their size as a subsistence business. To stay afloat, they diversified. First, Joe Jr. raised eyebrows by planting cattle feed; soon, skeptical neighbors were paying him to plant silage for them, too. He was also an early convert to artificial insemination—“the first A.I.!”—to strengthen the herd’s genetics. By the early 2000s, under Kevin’s guidance, the ranch became the first certified-organic beef ranch in Marin County.

In an era when younger generations often abandon their family farms for farther-flung places and newfangled jobs, Point Reyes stands out. Here, children and grandchildren have stayed, running the ranch alongside their families, often with a handful of employees and an extended family of neighbors pitching in. 

Over the decades, the Lunnys have found success in everything from paving and construction to quarrying, composting and mariculture. They’ve employed dozens of individuals across their various businesses, including family members and childhood friends like Jimmy Diesel, who has worked for Lunny Grading and Paving since 1980 and has known Kevin since their days at Marin Catholic High School.

In 2005, the family ventured into oyster farming, acquiring an operation that predated the national seashore by decades. Established in 1935, the Johnson Oyster Company operated under a 40-year reservation-of-use-and-occupancy agreement negotiated with the federal government in 1972. 

In 1976, nearly half of Point Reyes—25,370 acres—was rezoned as wilderness, but the estero was carved out as a “potential wilderness” area. The oyster farm’s permit included a renewal clause, and the designation simply meant the estero would convert to full wilderness status if the farm ever closed; it said nothing about whether the farm should be removed.

When the Lunnys took over the Johnsons’ state mariculture lease and renamed the business Drakes Bay Oyster Company, the operation was in a state of disrepair. They poured nearly a million dollars of borrowed money into restoring old buildings and leaky infrastructure, hoping to meet environmental standards and win favor from the park’s superintendent, Don Neubacher. But Mr. Neubacher made his position plain: once the lease ended in 2012, he had no intention of granting another.

Soon, he and park scientists, with support from then-Pacific West Regional Director Jon Jarvis, began attributing a series of environmental harms to the oyster farm: impacts on harbor seals, fish diversity, eelgrass cover and water quality, along with sediment disturbance and noise pollution. These claims spurred independent scientific scrutiny, including reviews by the Interior Department’s Inspector General and the Marine Mammal Commission. The National Academy of Sciences found the park service had  selectively presented and overinterpreted data.

Neither Mr. Neubacher nor Mr. Jarvis returned requests for comment. 

As news spread of the park service’s tactics, it caught the attention of Tim Setnicka, a former superintendent of Channel Islands National Park, who had seen this strategy before. In 1998, park officials, working in concert with the National Parks Conservation Association and the Sierra Club, orchestrated the closure of a historic Santa Rosa Island ranch, citing alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. 

Mr. Setnicka reached out to Kevin in 2008, warning him of what he believed was an agency playbook designed to dismantle private operations on national parklands. “NPS has an unlimited and free source of legal representation to throw against you,” he cautioned. To him, the strategy was clear: “manipulate and spin information to support the N.P.S.’s own purposes against their opponents.” 

The controversy thrust the oyster farm onto the national stage, and the public divided into pro-oyster and pro-wilderness factions. “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” signs dotted West Marin, while organizations like the Sierra Club, the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin and others aligned with the park service in defense of converting Drakes Estero to wilderness.

As the battle raged, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar—himself a former cattleman—denied the farm a new permit. Ranchers and their advocates voiced fears that the closure spelled the beginning of the end of agriculture on Point Reyes, but Mr. Salazar sought to assuage them, initiating a planning process for new 20-year ranch leases.

With legal help from pro bono attorneys, the Lunnys filed suit in 2012, arguing that Mr. Salazar’s decision had been informed by flawed science and should be overturned. The suit ultimately reached the steps of the United States Supreme Court, which in 2014 denied the oyster farm’s petition for a hearing. Months later, the farm was razed.

Along the way, the Lunnys attracted a motley crew of supporters: Everyone from Sen. Dianne Feinstein to writer Michael Pollan, chef Alice Waters, the Koch brothers and Donald Trump. “There’s something about the way they treated other people that inspired a lot of love in return,” said Peter Prows, who by 2012 had become their lead attorney. 

Kevin emerged as the peninsula’s most outspoken rancher not because he was a firebrand by nature, but because he and Nancy had schooled themselves in the arcana of the National Environmental Policy Act and the byzantine process of environmental review. 

“At the beginning of the oyster farm fight, we had no idea what NEPA was,” Nancy recalled. “Then we had this long car ride, and I read the citizens’ guide to NEPA out loud to Kevin.” By the time the pair arrived at the next meeting, they knew precisely which questions to ask.

At the time Drakes Bay Oyster Company closed, six families and 35 employees worked there, many of them living on site. Among them was Jorge Mata, the farm’s manager who had been there for 30 years with his family. Jorge’s son, Jorge Jr., also worked at the farm and was dating Brigid.

The government offered relocation money—$40,000 per employee—enough for Brigid and Jorge Jr. to put a down payment on a home in Santa Rosa.

Though the shuttering of the oyster farm struck some as a harbinger of what would soon befall the cattle operations, Gordon Bennett, a former Sierra Club representative and longtime critic of the oyster farm, saw it differently. When a trio of environmental groups sued the park service over ranching in 2016, Mr. Bennett and the N.P.C.A., two of the oyster farm’s fiercest opponents, urged the plaintiffs to reconsider. They declined. 

In Mr. Bennett’s eyes, the Lunnys’ fight inadvertently roused a more litigious, absolutist brand of environmental activism—one that had now turned its sights on the ranches. “They basically fought on an erroneous premise that the park was formed to protect agriculture,” he said. “Agriculture was a means, not an end, and that confusion between the means and the end set off this huge dispute and, unsurprisingly, engendered a big pushback.”

As early as 2000, however, the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuits over ranching, was quietly scrutinizing the grazing operations in the park. The late founder of the Resource Renewal Institute, another plaintiff, Huey Johnson, had also kept a close eye on Point Reyes. Mr. Johnson was explicit in his disdain for livestock operations on public lands: “You’ve got welfare ranching going on public lands all over the West,” he said in 2016.

Environmental historian Laura Watt sees a shift in conservation thinking—what she labels a “purity-based” mindset sharply at odds with the more pragmatic model that has previously held sway. In this new view, human habitation in a place like Point Reyes was an aberration, a mistake to be corrected.

“There was a big shift in environmentalism in the 1980s and 1990s,” Dr. Watt said. “You saw the rise of this more extreme wing of the environmental movement, and the rise of litigation as a crowbar.” 

While the untouched wilderness ethos had a hold on the park service since its founding in 1916, organizations grew increasingly savvy at pressuring the agency to manage Point Reyes according to a vision of nature that excludes residents, she said. 

The legal definition of “wilderness” reads like poetry: “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Now, the Point Reyes ranchlands are slated for a new “Scenic Landscape Zone”—precisely the sort of unpeopled vista Nancy Lunny believes the park service is after. “They want this human-less landscape,” she said, “and that nature be viewed from a distance.”

Twenty years of tangling with the park have left Kevin a reluctant rabble-rouser, inured to an outcome that no one had really wanted: leaving. 

“We always thought we would stay, but then it was like, do we really want to deal with the park service for another 20 years?” Brigid said. During negotiations, “there was a sense of, ‘Well, if you don’t leave, then we’re gonna make it difficult for the ones that are staying,’” she said. 

Rounding up cows stirs appetites, and at noon on a recent Saturday, the gang broke for lunch prepared by Nancy, Brigid and Patrick: taco salad with beef straight from their cows. It was loud and jovial. While waiting his turn to fill a plate, Kevin let Isabella and Emma paint his nails a jaunty shade of purple.

Across the yard, Joe sat in the quiet of his kitchen. In the living room, a stack of cardboard boxes awaited assembly. “I wanted to die here,” he said, his voice catching. 

Joe arrived at this ranch as a teenaged outsider; now he leaves as though surrendering a homeland. “It’s like losing a hand,” he said. Suddenly untethered at 94, he imagines buying a trailer he can shuffle between his children’s driveways, never staying in any one place too long.  

Before departing for good, the Lunnys must bid many goodbyes. At some point, they will attend one last 8 a.m. mass at Sacred Heart Church. They’ll shutter most of their businesses and round up the cows one final time on the green, rolling hills where they toiled and prospered. They will take their nightly walk from the front door down the dirt ranch road toward Abbotts Lagoon. And then they will pack the trucks for the three-hour drive east to the Sierra foothills, where a small house awaits on 10 acres—just enough room for a couple of cows.

“We’re trying to stay positive,” Kevin said. “We have to. It was sort of 20 years of nonstop attacks here, with something new every time you turn around. We’re leaving that behind now, and there’s peace in that.”

Nacho Franco and his partner’s daughter, Emma Arndt, share a tender moment after a long morning of hard work on the Lunny Ranch, where neighbors have lent a hand for generations. (George Alfaro / Point Reyes Light)