Rock Formations at the Emerald Forest Corridor properties. Photo by Lewis Ulman
210-acre EMERALD FOREST!!
Advancing a Connecting Corridor between
Clear Creek Metro Park & Hocking Hills State Park
Our dream is to build a one-mile preservation corridor between these two large, pre-existing conservation blocks. The 2-parcel Emerald Forest is critically-placed for the plan’s successful execution.
Total Project Cost: $2,244,793
Current balance yet to raise: $1,663,016 - as of 9/5/2025
Stewardship Funds critically needed
Oh, so close! Hocking Hills is inarguably the repository of the most stunningly beautiful landscapes in all of Ohio, attracting millions of tourists annually. Currenty, the two largest forest blocks in Hocking Hills are the 5300-acre contiguous Clear Creek Metro Park and the 11,500-acre Hocking Hills State Park and Forest, a more discontinuous mosaic. Where these two parks come the closest, they are separated by only one mile of privately-owned land.
Picking up the puzzle pieces. A few years ago, the Arc of Appalachia began buying and protecting wildlands in Hocking County - in part to mitigate for the region’s intense development of cabins and residential retreats. To date, we have purchased eight properties, accepted three land donations, and hold four conservation easements, totaling 1,333 acres!
An arc of connection! It was only a few months ago that we looked at a map of our progress and recognized that, by sheer synchronicity, the Arc of Appalachia was already close to connecting the dots between Clear Creek Metro Park and Hocking Hills State Park, via 1,055-acre Cantwell Cliffs State Park! See the map below.
Recently, when two large parcels of land came up for sale in the corridor region, the Emerald Forest campaign was born. Acquiring Emerald Forest will significantly widen the corridor and increase the opportunities for the final connection. Imagine the benefits to wildlife that a protected corridor of this size will bring! Scroll down for more details, and click on Hocking Hills Forever to view maps of all of the Arc’s preservation work in Hocking County.
The Gauley is a TREE-ROOTS campaign!! CLICK HERE TO BECOME AN ARC ALLY!
We will need an entire community of volunteers behind us if we are to succeed - people who are interested in sharing and endorsing the campaign link with their networks, speaking to local audiences, hosting peer-to-peer fundraisers, creating an art project, writing blogs, and/or maybe raising money for an acre ($2745) or more of land. You can also use this Arc Ally link to share your GREAT idea, and if it is in our power to ignite it, we will! Registering will connect you with an entire tool chest of support materials.
The 210 acres that compose the Emerald Forest boast pristine streams with clean sandy substrates, beaver ponds, striking rock formations, extensive wetlands of skunk cabbage, and vast colonies of wet-loving ferns. This preservation opportunity is simply breathtaking!
Protecting a healthy forest community. The Emerald Forest is a large block of mixed deciduous forest composed of mature oaks, hickories, beech, and maples. The landscape boasts expansive forested wetlands filled with skunk cabbage, and over a mile of pristine streams that support several species of salamanders and an abundance of aquatic insects. A large beaver pond dominates one of the parcels, and both properties shelter stunning rock formations. And, oh my, the fern diversity! Even though our botanical surveys are only in their preliminary stages, 17 species of ferns have already been observed, including vast colonies of cinnamon ferns which, in the wetlands, grow chest high.
For the Birds. The deep woodlands of the Emerald Forest support many migrating warbler species. including ovenbird, Louisiana waterthrush, Kentucky warbler, hooded warbler, worm-eating warbler, black and white warbler, American redstart, and wood thrush. Clear Creek Metro Park - to which these tracts nearly connect - is a designated National Audubon Society Important Bird Area that supports one of the largest concentrations of nesting warblers in Ohio. The Bird Area averages 16-19 warbler species annually, with the total number of breeding species topping over 100 species according to the National Audubon Society. Creating a protected corridor of healthy forests and waterways that support an abundance of insect species will further enhance the secure habitat available to many deep-forest bird species that depend upon large blocks of forest for their breeding success.
Please make a donation. Buying and saving land is a gift that keeps giving forever.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the timeline to save this property? A sympathetic nonprofit is holding one of the project parcels for the Arc of Appalachia, giving us until April 2026 to fully raise the campaign funds. If we fail to meet this deadline, one of the parcels making up this two-parcel project could be lost, while interest rates will begin on the other, the payment of which will severely damage our forward momentum. Completing this project by next spring is thus of the utmost importance. Because of our partnering nonprofit’s devotion and assistance, we are thankfully able to guarantee that all donations received will be safely applied to this campaign.
What expenses are covered by the campaign? The campaign total includes the sale price, closing costs, and a small percentage of funds (7% or less) to cover the cost of preparing the closing papers, running the campaign, pursuing grant sources, and processing the donations. All of this is accomplished in-house with our Arc staff. Stewardship funds are not included in this campaign and will be raised separately. For more information on how the Arc stewards its preserves, follow this link, “Stewardship Forever.”
Will I be able to visit the property? The Arc of Appalachia is renowned for developing some of Ohio’s most stunning trails, currently maintaining over 80 miles of them. We look forward to the day the corridor fills in between these two preservation forest blocks of Clear Creek and Hocking Hills via Cantwell Cliffs, because it would create a corridor in which we could build what we are sure would be an immensely popular connecting trail. In the meantime, we will offer guided hikes into the property from time to time. Be sure to subscribe to our education notices via email and through Telegram, a phone app that shares our nature discoveries, to keep up with our progress. Click the Subscribe button.
Is the Arc a trustworthy nonprofit? The answer is YES (naturally we are just a wee bit biased)! Our dynamic staff and committed board are all dedicated to integrity, honesty. efficiency, hard work, and transparency. The best reviews of all come from our donors, nearly all of whom stay with us long-term. Many who supported us when the Arc started 30 years ago are still a part of our community. For those of you interested in fiscal data, our 2024 audited financials are linked to our donation page. We invite you to read more about our mission here while also checking out our recent annual news magazines - a celebration of the Arc’s energized land preservation achievements! We hope you will consider visiting us at our headquarters, the 3,000-acre Highlands Nature Sanctuary in south central Ohio, where we have 18 miles of trails and overnight rental cabins.
Would you like to contact us? Phone our office staff at (937) 365-1935, or write to arcpreserveinfo@gmail.com. Our headquarters at the Appalachian Forest Museum is hosted by REAL people (amazing, right?), 7 days a week from March 15 to November 15, from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm. The other half of the year, our phones and emails are staffed Monday through Friday.
Help us spread the word about this campaign!
Something in this campaign has your name on it. Let us help you find it! Each one of us has a unique network. We are all separated from every other human being by no more than six handshakes. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but it is a lovely assertion of our interconnectedness. If you are willing to share news of this campaign to your networking circles, know that our front door is wide open to help you help us. We delight in putting broken lands back together again and removing the fences between them. And you know what? We feel exactly the same way about people. CLICK HERE TO BECOME AN ARC ALLY!
A Word About Grants. We will be trying to supplement some of the funding we need for the Emerald Forest campaign with grant monies, but even in the best scenario, grant money is glacially slow in arriving. And, because grants are competitively awarded, they are uncertain. Our goal, therefore, is to fully fund this project with private dollars. If, at a future time, we are lucky enough to be able to replace some of our private funding with grant monies, we will move the excess private funds back into our Land Revolving Fund. If so, that would be great news for both the campaign AND our donors because monies in the Land Revolving Fund are recycled, potentially leveraging funds over and over again for multiple future land projects.
Our donors love it when it works out this way, and we love it too! We can’t predict the future or know how this campaign will play out. Yet, when the call to protect something greater than ourselves grows loud, we answer together. This success belongs to all of us. We’ll continue sharing our progress as we work to protect Appalachian wildlands in the months and years ahead.