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Corps members donate more than 1,000 hours to restore Knobcone Point

Teamwork is everything.

For many years, Save Mount Diablo has been working with California State Parks, the East Bay Regional Park District, the East Contra Costa County Habitat Conservancy, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Cal Fire, and others, to create a lasting benefit for life as it exists on the land.

During the winter of 2021, we all noticed a need to focus our collective efforts on the Knobcone Point area of Mount Diablo, because it showed intense impacts of climate change–related stresses on numerous species like knobcone pines, Mount Diablo manzanita, and Contra Costa manzanita.

Tens of thousands of plants were injured or had died because of these impacts.

Quickly, as a team, we mobilized to further understand the causes and began taking next steps to help the land.

In January and February of 2026, the California Conservation Corps came to the rescue. Powered by Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund monies, the corps donated two eight-day work weeks (spikes) to Save Mount Diablo.

They brought 10 workers to help with thinning dead material in the Knobcone Point area, creating burn piles for future pile burns.

Every morning before sunrise, the crew would rise and get to it.

Our stewardship team had the opportunity to work with them for a few days; this was one of the strongest and most positive groups of people I have ever been around while working in a very technical and physically difficult environment.

Building burn piles is no easy task. The material needed to be cut to size, but first, it needed to be untangled from the other downed trees that all fell together. It’s as if a giant game of pickup sticks happened simultaneously, and we were there to untangle them.

The tangled trees became four-foot-tall teepees of neatly stacked and cleaned timber.

Each piece had to be cleaned of all the pinecones that were festooned to the trunks and branches of the trees and then laid together according to size to create a solid foundation to support the teepee or burn pile.

Together, an entire team of well trained, connected, and supportive individuals achieved the goal of applying this prescription to the focus area.

The California Conservation Corps members are future leaders.

Working with them in the hills one morning, I was able to see how closely these partners work with one another, sharing time on the saw, cleaning debris from branches, moving material based on size, and building and stacking piles.

The positive attitude that everyone shared while building for the next step in the burn process ignited my understanding of what teamwork and leadership in the conservation field really could look like.

For the California Conservation Corps members, their leadership song seems to be truly enjoying the process of facilitation, so that big dreams can be realized, like bringing sacred fire back to the landscape.

In the two weeks that the corps members worked with us and California State Parks in the Knobcone Point area, teams worked to stack material north of the PG&E utility road, and on the upper reaches of Knobcone Point Road.

The team built about a hundred piles to add to the piles that California State Parks and Civic Corps have built in the area too.

All this work is directed by a joint plan that Save Mount Diablo shares with Mount Diablo State Park to thin material in the area for a vegetation treatment program that guides management.

With more than 1,000 hours logged by the California Conservation Corps during the project (equivalent to one employee working for six months), a tremendous amount of preparation and good work has been achieved for the mountain, moving all of us much closer to the goal of helping our local environment in a lasting and impactful way.

It has been an absolute honor to work with the California Conservation Corps members for us at Save Mount Diablo, because they embody teamwork at the highest level: not only because they helped us complete some great work, but because they are a powerful and humbling reminder that we all have a place as a caretaker for our lands. That through teamwork across boundaries we can begin to remember the definitions of human being, stewardship, and reciprocity.

Teamwork makes the dream work, and together we need to be the team for our mountain and our planet.