Courtney and Levi McIsaac have been up in their parent’s attic lately, duly sifting through decades of family debris.
Their findings read like a set of cryptic clues: a $23 hospital bill for their great uncle Rome’s gut pain. Kodacolor snapshots of their Tocaloma ranch. A rifle loaded with a single round. A 1970s letter from a congressman to their grandfather Don McIsaac, expressing the government’s interest in purchasing his land.
“It’s in pristine condition,” Levi said. “Still in the original envelope and everything.”
After their mother, Rhea, died last November—two years after their father, Ted—Levi moved into their two-story farmhouse with his wife, Saga, and their teenage daughters. Since the 1860s, the timeworn clapboard house has held six generations of McIsaacs. Courtney lives in a smaller home on the property with her husband, Robin, and toddler twin boys.
The McIsaacs are among seven families still ranching in the Olema Valley stretch of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area managed by the Point Reyes National Seashore.
For the first time in years, these families are exhaling. A years-long legal standoff over ranching in the park has ended—with the closure of a dozen historic operations. But not theirs.
The settlement preserves ranching in the G.G.N.R.A. and, in some instances, expands grazing areas, opens new avenues for diversification and allows for increased herd sizes. Yet those who remain describe a sense of closure tinged with remorse.
“We talk about having this sense of survivor’s guilt,” Levi said on a recent morning. “We got these leases at the cost of losing our friends and neighbors. Our future is looking pretty good, but some of them are going to be screwed. They’re not getting enough money to go and live any kind of life like they’re living now.”
As the alphabet ranches on the western side of the San Andreas fault grow quiet, seven Olema Valley families are looking toward a future anchored by 20-year leases and new operating agreements.
As recently as last year, many feared they might lose everything. “One day I’d think it was all going to work out,” third-generation rancher Luke Giacomini recalled, “and the next I’d be back on Zillow.”
Unlike the Point Reyes peninsula’s exposed pastures, which millions of visitors drive through en route to trailheads and coastal vistas, the Olema ranches mostly lie tucked behind stands of oak and fir or nestled in shaded glens. Largely spared from debates over tule elk and water quality, these lands haven’t drawn the same scrutiny as their sister park. So when the Nature Conservancy stepped in to broker a deal, it offered lease buyouts to ranchers on the peninsula but not to their Olema neighbors.
“Because of the nature of the conflict, the focus area always appeared to be Point Reyes National Seashore,” said Michael Bell, the Nature Conservancy’s protection strategy director. “Point Reyes is one of the last remaining coastal wetland complexes. It’s a different story for the G.G.N.R.A.”
Both areas were forces in California’s burgeoning dairy industry in the latter half of the 19th century. Levi and Courtney are the progeny of two pioneering families who, like many others, were lured by the promise of productive pasture.
Nova Scotia-born Neil McIsaac, who fought in the Civil War, settled near Olema in 1868; Giuseppe Codoni, a Swiss immigrant from Valle Verzasca, established a dairy along Lagunitas Creek the same year McIsaac arrived, in what would come to be called Tocaloma.
Their black Angus cattle still bear the “RT” brand, for Rancho Tocaloma. Courtney and her sister Mandy have the initials inked behind their ears.
“When we were younger, I think we took this place—and what it meant to be the fifth generation—for granted,” Courtney reflected. “But then we realized we didn’t want to be the ones to end it.”
In 1983, a decade after President Nixon signed the bill that established the recreation area, the federal government purchased the McIsaac ranch for $2 million, granting a 25-year agreements that eventually gave way to a series of short-term permits. The Olema ranchlands would mark the northern terminus of a sprawling greenbelt stretching from the beaches of San Francisco to the south end of Tomales Bay.
Ted McIsaac, an inveterate surfer and one-time park ranger, returned to Olema after a few years of roaming. “It took seeing the rest of the world before I knew what I had at home was good,” he told the Light in a 1987 interview. He was more conservation-minded than his profit-focused father, Levi said, and was known for feeding the cows in a dinged-up Ford Ranger, five miniature dachshunds crowding the passenger seat, “K-9 UNIT” emblazoned on the door.
After Ted’s passing, Courtney and Levi took over. She handles weekday ranch chores while he, employed by the National Park Service’s road crew, works evenings and weekends. They are one of three families, along with the Giacominis and the Zanardis, allowed to reside on ranch property. The others operate with grazing-only leases.
Whereas on Point Reyes, the tule elk became a rallying cry for environmental activists, in Olema, ranchers have faced quieter scrutiny over fish habitat in Olema Creek—a tributary of Lagunitas Creek, home to the largest run of coho salmon on the Central California coast. “They have elk, we have fish,” Luke quipped.
Over the years, the ranchers have partnered with environmental groups like the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, the Marin Resource Conservation District and the Natural Resources Conservation Service to restore streams and improve riparian zones. A 2019 study showed a 95 percent drop in fecal coliform levels in Olema Creek over a 19-year span.
In the aftermath of January’s settlement, the ranchers say their relationship with the park service has grown more codified. For the first time, the G.G.N.R.A. leases share the same standard framework, rental structure and two-decade duration.
“Now it’s just so much more official,” Olema rancher Lou Zanardi said. “It used to be more of a handshake deal—you’d go talk to the park folks, and that was it.”
But the road to these agreements was long and winding. About a year ago, when it became apparent that some ranchers would be departing and others staying, they resisted splitting into opposing factions.
“Because we were negotiating as one group, we leveraged people getting on board with leaving for the park getting on board with giving us what we wanted,” Levi said.
According to other sources, park officials at first floated five-year leases for the non-residential operations, along with steep rent hikes—terms ranchers deemed unworkable.
“They’re all very small businesses,” Lou said. “It’s very difficult to see the light unless you have a very good lease.”
Kevin Lunny, a Point Reyes rancher who accepted a buyout, recalled telling park service lawyers about the Olema ranchers, “If you want to get rid of us, you’ll have to give them a fair lease. You can’t just kill them off.”
On a recent morning, Levi steered his Chevy pickup, stripped to its silver body, up a steep hillside with his 13-year-old daughter, Devin, riding shotgun. They paused to mend fences and guide their herd to greener pastures. From the ridgeline, nearly every grassy knoll and dell in sight belonged to their newly expanded lease, now stretching across some 3,000 acres of undulating pasture—a 700-acre and 40-cow increase from before.
Levi and Luke, who have been best friends since childhood, are splitting the pastures of the Stewart ranch, which hasn’t been grazed for several years. “I’ve probably gained the most out of everybody,” Luke said. “Before, I was basically getting cut down to 70 cows. Now I could probably run almost 180.”
Not everyone’s acreage increased. Just down the road, Lou, who once had 40 cows on 481 acres, is being capped at 30 head, though he was offered a 317-acre seasonal allotment—an option he is still considering. Another neighbor, Fred Rogers, has been told to reduce his herd of 60 cows to 39.
“I don’t know how it decreased,” Fred said. “I never paid attention to it. I was running 60 head for a while and, all of a sudden, I’m told I gotta change things.”
Under the new arrangement, ranchers with residential leases can diversify. The McIsaacs plan to continue their horse-boarding enterprise, plant apple and pear trees, open a small farmstand, and later add egg-laying hens—though concerns about avian flu have stalled poultry projects for now. The Zanardis hope to grow fruit, flowers and vegetables for a roadside stand and eventually host overnight visitors. Luke, who runs a tiling business, prefers to stick with cattle.
For Levi, taking on new ventures requires paperwork he’s never dealt with before. “I have to submit a detailed plan with a map of where I’m planting each tree, how I’m digging the holes, how I’ll harvest the fruit and exactly when that will happen,” he said.
Even so, the ranchers say they feel more empowered to invest in upkeep: water systems, home improvements, barn repairs and other projects they had long deferred.
“It’s complicated because this is my home as long as I’ve been alive and I want to keep it as nice as possible,” Levi explained. “But then, on the other hand, there’s this financial aspect of it. I don’t own this building. How can I preserve it, make it nice, but not bankrupt myself? Because I’m never gonna get my money back out.”
Several projects around the McIsaac property have languished during uncertain times. A ranch house has had only half a new roof for five years; the south-facing wall of Courtney’s home still awaits a portion of new framing and siding. On both, they’ve jerry-rigged a tarp. Under the new leases, restoring these historic buildings can qualify for rent credits.
On a recent windless evening, a half-dozen Olema ranchers gathered around the McIsaacs’ kitchen table, the banter occasionally perforated by moments of elegiac sentimentality. Fred and Lou, a generation older, were treated like a pair of visiting sages by Luke, Levi and Courtney, all in their 40s.
“Luke and I are becoming middle-aged now,” Levi told them. “And as you watch how the generations dwindle, it’s like, oh man, there’s not two generations above us anymore. So don’t go anywhere soon, okay?”
“Oh, you’re in the front row now,” Fred retorted.
They laughed and marveled at how swiftly the world was changing. More than anything, they said, the settlement felt like a sea change, cementing an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.
“West Marin has changed so much in the last 20 years with all the historic families kind of slowly filtering away, and the new people that are coming in,” Luke said. “It’s crazy how everything you love about a place can kinda just disappear.”