Apaches in Oklahoma buy back some ancestral land in Arizona

Since 1980, the Trust for Public Land has completed 77 projects and conserved more than 300,000 acres in Arizona alone.

Nationwide, the group has protected over 4 million acres and raised over $112 billion in public funding for conservation, while helping to create more than 5,500 parks, trails, schoolyards and other outdoor spaces.

Patrick said he was looking for property in Arizona or New Mexico that might be meaningful to the descendants of the Chiricahua Apaches when he came across a real estate listing for the land in the Dragoons.

That was in December, and by January he had entered into a signed option agreement with the sellers.

“It moved very quickly for a conservation project, which tend to move rather slowly,” he said.

The property was jointly owned by a couple in Green Valley and a widower in Phoenix, who went in on it together about 20 years ago. Patrick said they spent a lot of time camping there but never got around to building houses on the land like they planned.

“It’s pretty pristine,” he said. “They were very supportive of not just selling the land for conservation but also the idea of the tribe coming into ownership of it.”

The timing was perfect, he said, because tribal leaders told him they had just laid out a vision a few months earlier of trying to reacquire some of their ancestral lands in the Southwest.

After an appraisal process and an environmental assessment, the Trust purchased the property for $550,000, then sold it to the tribe for the same amount.