COVELO, Mendocino County - Three years ago, a 26,600-acre ranch in remote Northern California, with a 10-bedroom lodge, 16 miles of riverfront and two herds of Roosevelt elk, was drawing attention in the nation's luxury real estate market.
The family of the late investment giant and onetime ranch owner Dean Witter was ready to unload their unusually large property and seeking a wealthy buyer for the one-of-a-kind site.
As it turns out, the $25 million plot on the Eel River, which spans both Mendocino and Trinity counties, will go to a conservation group. The Wildlands Conservancy closed escrow on the tract Tuesday and plans to turn this mostly untamed stretch of mountains and valleys into a preserve open to the public.
"It's just as scenic as anything in the national park system," said Frazier Haney, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, during a recent helicopter tour of the property, which started in Ukiah about 40 minutes by air to the ranch.
The group expects to soon welcome people to the site for hiking, biking, kayaking, swimming and camping.
The deal was years in the making. The Wildlands Conservancy has long wanted to showcase a part of California better known for private pot farms than public recreation, an area it calls the Grand Canyon of the Eel River.
The property is at the heart of this wild gorge and at the center of the organization's long-term goal of protecting and providing access to much of the Eel River's 196-mile run - from the Mendocino National Forest to the Humboldt County coast. The Witter plot, once known as Lone Pine Ranch and set to be renamed the Eel River Canyon Preserve, is the group's fifth and largest acquisition along the river.
When the helicopter arrived at the southern edge of the property, it touched down on a sandy beach where the main fork of the Eel meets the north fork. Water gushed down the riverbed. Maple trees with fall hues of yellow and orange punctuated evergreen woodlands. Horse Ranch Peak loomed nearby at more than 4,000 feet.
"It has that feeling like you're really off the beaten track," said Peter Galvin, program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, who joined the tour and whose organization helped with the purchase.
Across the river was another selling point for the Wildlands Conservancy and its supporters: the out-of-service Northwestern Pacific Railroad. The ranch acquisition is expected to advance efforts to turn the lengthy rail line into a public path for hiking and biking. The project would be part of the Great Redwood Trail, a multi-use path in the works by a coalition of support groups and local lawmakers, running from from San Francisco Bay to Humboldt Bay.
"We haven't had access to the Eel River Canyon," said state Sen. Mike McGuire, one of the chief proponents of the Great Redwood Trail, who was on the tour surveying where the 320-mile route would go. "It's a spectacular landscape."
The helicopter proceeded down the canyon, and up and over the grounds of the 5,300 square-foot main lodge, an area slated to be the headquarters of the preserve. By car, the site is about five to six hours from the Bay Area, through the Mendocino County community of Covelo.
Within the next year, the lodge will be retrofitted for visitors while a ranger station and primitive campground will be built nearby. A trail network will evolve from the ranch's existing roads and trails. Initially, the property will be accessible only by reservation, but in two years, once the new owners have more time to prepare, they hope to open to the public more broadly.
The helicopter's final destination was a mountain meadow tucked deep in the forest, known as Rice Lake. Another campground is planned for south of here. Reports of Roosevelt elk, which roam the property, are common in this area. The lake is also popular with cattle, some of which will remain on the property as vestiges of the past.
Dean Witter, who founded the San Francisco investment house Dean Witter and Co., bought up a handful of parcels to create the ranch in the 1940s. He and his wife, Helen, would take a train from Marin County to a stop on the property along the Eel River to visit, about a seven-hour hour ride. Witter used the property as a retreat, timber operation and working cattle ranch.
After Witter's death in 1969, the ranch was handed down for use by generations of family, who in recent years decided it was too much for them to handle.
"When we put the ranch on the market, I had the very earnest prayer that the place be passed on to an entity that would take as good of or better care than us," Brooks Witter, Dean's great grandson, told The Chronicle by phone from his home in Colorado.
In 2019 the Wildlands Conservancy bought the nearby 3,000-acre White Ranch on the Eel River from the Witter family, which gave the group a two-year option to buy the Lone Pine Ranch.
The organization, based in San Bernardino County, obtained the $25 million from a recent $10 million state budget appropriation, state grants, the Center for Biological Diversity and a Packard Foundation loan through the national nonprofit Conservation Fund. Fundraising efforts continue to repay the $8 million debt.
The property is among more than 20 preserves in California run by the Wildlands Conservancy. Most of the sites are open to the public free of charge.
Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander