The Elk Fence at Point Reyes Is Finally Coming Down

The National Park Service took action to dismantle the controversial barrier

Text and photographs by Jeremy Miller

December 27, 2024

Photo by Jeremy Miller

Earlier this month, with no announcement or fanfare, National Park Service workers began dismantling a controversial fence in the northern reaches of Point Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco. For more than 45 years, that barrier—eight feet high and two miles long—has hemmed a herd of elk into a 2,600-acre preserve on a windswept peninsula called Tomales Point. 

During drought years, Tomales Point has been an elk graveyard, with mass die-offs caused by dehydration, starvation, and disease. For years, environmentalists, conservation advocates, elk docents, and vociferous activists have lobbied for the fence’s removal, writing petitions, producing documentaries, and often using creative methods of protest to draw attention to this barrier opponents have dubbed the “ungulate Berlin Wall.” A watershed moment came in 2021, when a group of private citizens and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, working with the Animal Law & Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, sued the Park Service in federal court after dozens of animals died within the Tomales preserve. Now, it seems, the park is finally addressing those concerns. “The benefit of removing this enclosure,” said Anne Altman, Point Reyes’s superintendent, “is to allow elk to access additional habitat, increase the species’ population resilience during drought, and promote a more natural population cycle.”

Like so many fences across the American West, the elk barrier at Tomales Point was erected at the behest of cattle ranchers—which brings us to the unusual circumstances of the seashore’s establishment. Point Reyes is one of the only national park units that has working farms within its boundaries. The seashore’s dual mission—to protect landscapes while also maintaining historic ranching operations—was considered, at the time of its establishment in 1962, a monumental compromise between federal administrators, dairy ranchers, and environmentalists, including David Brower, the storied former president of the Sierra Club.

I wanted to see the missing section of this infamous fence for myself. So, on a sunny December afternoon, I drove north from my home in the East Bay, through the redwood groves of Marin County and into the small town of Inverness, situated on the placid waters of Tomales Bay. I was on my way to meet with Ken Bouley, director of Turtle Island Restoration Network, one of a coalition of environmental groups that have pushed for over a decade to have the fence removed. At a blind corner, I dodged a truck with a livestock carrier hitched to the back. The scene is uncommon for most national parks, but not for Point Reyes, where ranchers have grazed livestock along its rolling hills and plunging cliffsides for more than a century. 

When the seashore was established 62 years ago, the Park Service bought up those historic ranches, which it then rented back to the ranchers for 20- and 30-year leases. Today, there are roughly 20 working ranches within Point Reyes’s boundaries. Their large herds of Devons, Jerseys, Guernseys, and Holsteins—which number close to 6,000—are a far more common sight across the seashore than its roughly 700 elk. Even when the droves of cattle aren’t in view, signs of their presence are everywhere. In winter, muddy wallows scar the green hillsides and manure-tinged water flows from dairy facilities, across the pavement and into ditches along the roadside.

I met Bouley at a cattleguard near the entrance to the Tomales preserve. His moppish hair, graying slightly, blew in the wind. The back of his T-shirt read “Nature Provides the Answers.” On the west side of the road, opposite of where we stood, a tall fence made of high posts and thick black wire followed the contours of the hillside; on the other side of the road, it was erased by saws and wire cutters. “If you look in the grass, you can see where the posts were cut,” he said. Bouley said that elk have already been seen utilizing the 850-foot gap and moving out of the preserve. 

Even though the fence was gone, a clear dividing line remained. On the side of the fence where cattle were allowed to graze, the hillside was covered in a feeble stubble of grasses, thistle, and patches of mud. On the preserve side, however, which for four decades has been off-limits to cattle and browsed by elk, lay a proliferation of native shrubs and grasses. 

When the small population of Tule elk, Cervus canadensis nannodes, were brought to the park in 1978, the species had almost vanished. They were native to a large swath of central and northern California including Point Reyes. But relentless hunting and destruction of habitat took its toll, and by the late 1800s, the Tule elk was presumed extinct. Then, in 1874 a small population was discovered on a massive ranch in the Central Valley belonging to the cattle baron Henry Miller. There, a small number of animals survived until 1976, when Congress passed an act to create federal preserves to protect the species. Two years later, 10 elk (eight females and two males) were captured and released at Point Reyes.

The elk population has fluctuated, experiencing at least three crashes in the past 25 years, dropping to a low of 283 animals after a severe drought in 2015. “You had hundreds of animals in the care of the National Park Service, dying prolonged, painful deaths of dehydration and malnutrition,” said Bouley. 

In 1998, Park Service officials attempted to head off that situation, transplanting elk from Tomales Point to other parts of the park. Those animals have gone on to form two other distinct populations outside of the Tomales Point preserve. (A few other intrepid elk have escaped from the enclosure, perhaps by swimming in the ocean to skirt the fence, forming a third, smaller herd just outside the Tomales preserve.) Bouley noted that none of those other herds suffered the mass die-offs that the Tomales Point herd did. “The problem is the fence,” he told me. “It’s very clear.” 

Jeff Miller, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the fundamental problem with the fence is that it doesn’t permit elk to behave naturally. “They are unable to roam,” he told me. “During drought conditions, there is insufficient water and forage at Tomales Point. And so you had these boom-and-bust population cycles.” Removing the barrier, Miller said, will allow the animals to roam freely in search of water and forage as well as mates in different herds. 

Because all of Point Reyes’s elk come from a mere 10 animals, their genetic diversity is compromised—a “genetic bottleneck” that has made the population much more susceptible to disease. Removal of the fence, said Bouley, will allow the Tomales elk to mingle with their cousins in other herds scattered across the park. That interbreeding will allow them to better endure outbreaks, the most serious of which is Johne’s disease, a serious and widespread gastrointestinal ailment transmitted from domestic livestock to wild animals.  

The day after the Tomales Point fence removal began, the California Cattlemen’s Association, a Sacramento-based lobbying group, filed a preliminary injunction to halt the project. The Park Service immediately stopped the removal but not before this 850-foot parcel of fence had been taken down. For now, to the consternation of ranchers, the Park Service has no plans to put it back up. Kevin Lunny, a rancher who operates a 1,400-acre parcel called Ranch G near Tomales Point, testified in the CCA lawsuit that elk pose a threat to his herd, stating that he has seen “fences destroyed” and “elk bullying cattle away from feed and water.”

Bouley said such concerns should be taken with a grain of salt. He enumerated the depredations of livestock. High concentrations of fecal bacteria has been detected in dozens of beaches and streams, he said, and stray cattle have trampled critical habitat of the endangered snowy plover. (Cattle also attract ravens, which prey on plover eggs.) “There is private agricultural land as far as the eye can see in Marin County,” Bouley said. “This is a national park, and it should be managed with the needs of wild animals in mind, not livestock. We need to move past this experiment.” 

Though the Park Service would not comment for this story due to the pending litigation, the NPS elk management plan estimates that the 71,000-acre park could sustain a population of several thousand elk. In a landscape free from grazing, said Bouley, Point Reyes could reach those numbers in 20 years. “Eventually there will be a population problem,” he said. “But our position is, let's have that population problem. When there are fewer than 6,000 Tule elk in the entire world—1 percent of the historic population, give or take—it’s a good problem to have.” Once the elk reach carrying capacity, he said, the animals could be transported out of the park to other preserves to help bolster their numbers. 

The future for the species here and elsewhere, however, remains hazy. Last week, a federal judge denied a motion filed by Point Reyes ranchers to prevent a potential buyout of Point Reyes’s farmers by the Nature Conservancy, which could eliminate livestock from the seashore for good. But now the shadow of the Trump administration and its industry-friendly agenda hangs over Point Reyes, as it does for all federal lands. Bouley mentioned that Kevin Lunny, the outspoken rancher adjacent to the elk fence, is an ally of the president-elect. “He actually went and met Trump during the first administration,” he said. In addition to his cattle operation, Lunny operated the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, forced to close in 2014 when the Department of the Interior announced it would not renew its 40-year lease. In that meeting, Trump asserted that Lunny was a victim of “the terrible practice of a certain way of government handling of things.”

“I can tell you one thing,” said Bouley. “If this fence goes back up, I’ll be going to jail."