KEWEENAW COUNTY — The Nature Conservancy, a global conservation organization, announced Thursday that it acquired the 31,000-acre Heartlands forest properties for sale by The Rohatyn Group, a global asset management firm with expertise in forestry, agriculture and emerging markets.

Helen Taylor, state director of TNC in Michigan, said TNC acquired the acreage for $27.2 million on Wednesday.

On June 28, 2021, American Forest Management Real Estate, representing TRG, placed the timberland on the market with a price tag of $43,193,000.

The property listing came three years after the possibility of a land swap between TRG and the state of Michigan was proposed by TRG. The proposed swap involved commercial forest land in Keweenaw County for lands elsewhere in the Upper Peninsula. Potentially, that could have included everything north of U.S. 41, comprising from 4,000 to 30,000 acres.

Eric Stier, who was the regional manager of American Forest Management at the time, addressed the Keweenaw County Board in August 2018 on the proposed swap. The land swap idea was first brought up between 1997 and 1999, Stier told the board, and involved the entire tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

TRG owned the forest property throughout Keweenaw County for the past 15 years and the group had been seeking to sell it since the 1990s.

Dan Eichinger, director of Michigan Department of Natural Resources, who spoke at the Thursday press conference, said that the DNR is happy to have worked on the project with TNC, which he said he believed everyone in the room had been following since it was first announced that the acreage had been listed for sale.

“It really hit home for the people who live, work and play here on the Keweenaw Peninsula,” he said, “about how important it is for us to sustain and preserve those properties.”

Eichinger said one of the trends that has been observed within the DNR is that land ownership is changing.

“We’re in kind of in a transitional phase,” he said, “particularly across the Upper Peninsula, where we’re going to continue to see these kinds of large-scale land transactions coming down the pike.”

A lot of the recreational land, as well as access to it, exists because those properties are enrolled in the Commercial Forest Act, Eichinger said. Much of the trail network, whether motorized or nonmotorized, is dependent upon those properties.

Keweenaw County has known for several years how delicate the balance between CFA land and trail access can be. Ray Chase, Houghton Township supervisor, said that while he is cautiously optimistic with the land acquisition, it does not immediately resolve all concerns regarding trail access to those lands.

“I’m still concerned about the pieces for trail acquisition,” he said, in reference to trail accesses and rights of way. “We could lose a section of the trail, then this whole thing is worthless out here. So, that’s my biggest concern.”

For example, Chase said, a private party purchased five acres of land in Mohawk, a number of years ago, on which is a section of trail that the buyer closed to public use.

“The DNR was supposed to be buying trail segments from of these private landowners,” he said. “It was three years ago we put that together and they still haven’t done it.”

On Jan. 17, 2018, Chase, who with the Houghton-Keweenaw Recreation Authority, addressed the Keweenaw County Board, saying that the Michigan Department of Natural Resources was at the time in the process of purchasing rights of way from Calumet to Mohawk from private land owners.

State Rep. Greg Markkanen (R), who was present during the conference, was more optimistic, saying that the land acquisition is a historical moment.

“For all of the stakeholders involved, including the people of Keweenaw County and the U.P.,” he said, “It’s a win-win situation. We’re securing the land, we’re securing the access, and the people will be able to use this for future generations.”