POST purchases 207-acre hillside property

The property is located near the intersection of Bailey Avenue and McKean Road in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, west of the North Coyote Valley Conservation Area established by POST, the City of San José and the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority in 2019, according to the nonprofit that purchases land for other groups to preserve and manage.

POST’s acquisition of this property helps secure a wildlife corridor through Coyote Valley between two California mountain ranges—the coastal Santa Cruz Mountains and the inland Diablo Range, according to POST.

This property is part of the ancestral lands of numerous indigenous peoples, who stewarded the land for millennia and whose descendants, members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, still reside in the region. The property had previously been a dairy farm owned by W. E. “Dutch” Holthouse, who died in 1977. It has remained in the Holthouse family for three generations. The family once owned over 1,000 acres in this location but sold approximately 970 acres to IBM in 1975. That adjacent campus remains largely undeveloped, and Santa Clara County Parks holds a floating trail easement over that portion. The property purchased by POST is used primarily for cattle-grazing, which will continue for the foreseeable future, according to POST.