The Alzada Preserve now protects a fire-scarred foothill parcel east of Chaney Trail, where coast live oaks are resprouting and mule deer continue to use the meadows. The Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy’s acquisition adds land to a protected foothills network. Public accounts give the parcel different acreage figures, a discrepancy the available records do not resolve.
ColoradoBoulevard.net reported that the conservancy purchased a parcel it described as 20 acres and named it the Alzada Preserve. A Los Angeles County grant-list document describes the same acquisition as approximately 22.68 acres, according to a filing from Los Angeles County; the available records do not explain the difference. The land is in the San Gabriel Mountains foothills, east of Chaney Trail and near Millard Falls Campground and Angeles National Forest land, per ColoradoBoulevard.net.
A Decades-Long Effort to Protect the Land
The conservancy was founded in 2000, and ColoradoBoulevard.net reports that its effort to protect this property dates to that founding. Alzada is the group’s seventh preserve overall and its third in Altadena, joining Millard Canyon and Rubio Canyon, the outlet reports.
Those sister preserves give a sense of scale: Rubio Canyon Preserve covers 41 acres and is regularly frequented by bears, mountain lions and deer, according to the Los Angeles Times. The same report notes the conservancy has saved more than 140 acres from development since its founding, with its Rosemont Preserve alone documenting 10 different mountain lions over nine years.
Fire Damage and Early Signs of Recovery
The Eaton Fire ignited in the hills of Eaton Canyon near Altadena on the evening of January 7, 2025, according to the InciWeb Eaton Post-Fire BAER Assessment Summary Report. The Alzada property burned in that fire, and winter storms afterward caused debris slides that altered its stream and slopes, the Colorado Boulevard report notes.
Still, the land is showing signs of life. AFC said many mature oaks survived the fire and are resprouting, while native plants including lemonade berry, blue elderberry and deerweed are returning to the property, per the same account. That matches the broader pattern documented by federal assessors, who found that resprouting of trees and shrubs as well as emergence of forbs had been noted within the burned area as a whole, according to the BAER report. That same assessment cautioned that it is typical for recovery to take between three and five years for reestablishment of ground cover, and that persistent drought in the years following wildfires can delay that timeline further.
Erosion Risk and Open-Space Protection
The U.S. Forest Service’s Eaton Fire BAER technical report says the San Gabriel Mountains’ average slope gradient exceeds 65 percent, contributing to high erosion rates in dry and wet periods. That is regional hazard context, not a site-specific assessment or a list of Los Angeles County debris-flow and watershed-stabilization projects; the county grant record cited above documents land acquisition, a different kind of action from post-fire stabilization.
The preserve today includes coast live oaks, sycamores, a seasonal stream and meadowland visited by mule deer, the outlet reports. Nearby in the Chaney Trail corridor, wildlife returned to the burn scar quickly after the fire — project founder Kristen Ochoa told LAist that “the coyotes and the ravens were there right away.” By late March 2025, one of Ochoa's trail cameras caught a mountain lion pausing in the frame at 10 p.m., and a week later cameras recorded a female mountain lion with two juveniles in another part of Millard Canyon, LAist reported. Ochoa later described elderberry and black sage regrowing in the burned area after rain.
Part of a Larger Wildlife Corridor
Alzada is one link in an east-west wildlife corridor along the San Gabriel foothills. ColoradoBoulevard.net reports that the route connects with Millard Canyon Preserve and extends toward the San Rafael Hills through Arroyo Seco and Cottonwood Canyon Preserve. Cottonwood Canyon Preserve covers 11 acres, the Los Angeles Times notes, illustrating the role small parcels can play in connecting habitat.
The conservancy has also advocated for a broader 20-mile Hahamongna-to-Tujunga Wildlife Corridor intended to connect open spaces across the region for wildlife passage, according to the Los Angeles Times. Alzada’s position along the foothills route gives the protected parcel a role beyond Altadena as the land recovers from fire and storm damage.
