What: Pine Hill Preserve Tours
Where: Six field trips within 3 units of the Pine Hill Preserve, western El Dorado County
What to see: These tours will bring you up close and personal with not only the 8+ rare plant species that the Preserve was established to protect with habitat conservation, but you’ll also see the diverse habitats of the Preserve, from grassland to (two types of!) chaparral, to oak woodlands, and many, many other plant species. The Pine Hill Preserve is found within the El Dorado County gabbroic intrusive geological complex, where there are a number of plants that are found nowhere else on earth. However, within the area of this gabbroic complex, there are 740+ species of plants, making this a biodiversity hotspot within the biodiversity hotspot that is California as a whole. Depending on which tour you join, you will see many of these plant species as well as animals – two of our tours focus on these: birds at Kanaka Valley and pollinators on Pine Hill itself. See the tours list below.
Field trip participants will meet at designated areas and, for the Pine Hill tours, will carpool to the site; participants will be notified of where to meet with a confirmation email sent upon sign-up for each tour.
