The iconic Gleason Beach / Scotty Creek watershed presents a prime example of a place where early pioneering settlers, digging out a dirt road by hand and horse-drawn equipment, followed the shortest distance between two points.
Before contemporary land use planning was even a thing here, a precarious subdivision was sold off and houses built on an already-crumbling cliffside that has, quite predictably, continued to crumble.
At the heart of our Local Coastal Plan, from the beginning, the critical importance of this particular valley, with its varied lush wetlands, its cozy sheltered pocket beach where rehabilitated marine mammals have long been released back to the wild, and its recognized historic – and even prehistoric – rich cultural significance, has long been duly acknowledged as one of our most important Sonoma Coast “Scenic Landscape Units”, or SLU’s.
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