A Champion for Conservation
Carole Combs’ legacy is written on the land she loved.
—Aaron Collins, Director of Investments & Partnerships
with additional contributions made by Rob Hansen, Sequoia Riverlands Trust Board Director Emeritus
Sequoia Riverlands Trust mourns the passing of Carole K. Combs, 83, the founding Executive Director of SRT and a driving force behind conservation in the Tulare Lake Basin.
“Carole will be remembered by all those who worked with her in the conservation community in Central California as a tireless—and far too humble—champion of wild places and wild things.”
Carole loved the southern Sierra and the many wild places in the Tulare Lake Basin. After growing up in Ohio, she married Richard “Dick” Combs, a career diplomat from a legacy Tulare County family.
Carole cherished times spent with her daughters and grandchildren at the Combs family cabin, one of the historical cabins up in Tulare County’s Mineral King valley. After working in government relations, communications, and fundraising in The Nature Conservancy’s national office in Arlington, Virginia from 1979-96, and the Monterey Institute for International Studies from 1996-99, she and Dick retired to a beautiful property on the Kaweah River’s North Fork in Three Rivers, land now permanently protected as one of the conservation easement properties managed by Sequoia Riverlands Trust.
During the 1990s, Carole collaborated with SRT board member emeritus Rob Hansen to build a coalition of private funders, NGOs, and state and federal agencies to raise the $1.3 million needed to acquire the 725-acre SRT James K. Herbert Wetland Prairie Preserve, a remarkable complex of grassland, vernal pools, riparian habitat, and freshwater ponds near Tulare. The preserve was dedicated in 2000 as the second natural area to be owned and managed by SRT.
“Carole leaves a vital and transformational legacy of conservation in our region, and she will be deeply missed. We are so grateful for her expertise and leadership during our earliest years, and for the steady wisdom she imparted over the many years since.”
That same year, Carole led the merger of three existing Tulare County land trusts––Four Creeks, Kaweah, and Tule Oaks––into what we know today as Sequoia Riverlands Trust. After her time as Executive Director, she continued to serve on the SRT Board of Directors until 2005.
During her long, devoted tenure as founding Executive Director of Tulare Basin Watershed Partnership (which she co-founded), Carole pursued a whole watershed approach to landscape-scale conservation when she oversaw the preparation of three Conceptual Area Protection Plan (CAPP) documents in collaboration with California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Those plans (the Sand Ridge—Tulare Lake, Goose Lake, and Buena Vista Lake—and Kern Lake CAPPs), along with a study of all the riparian corridors in the Tulare Lake Basin, serve as a model for a watershed corridor plan called, “Sequoias to the Sloughs,” from the headwaters to the Tulare Lakebed floodplain of Deer Creek in Tulare County.
Just over three years ago, Carole and Dick returned to Orleans, Massachusetts to be near their children and grandchildren.
