During the night of September 27-28, while storm Agnes drowned out any other sounds, some troubled soul took a chainsaw to Britain’s beloved “Robin Hood Tree” in northern England. The following morning, hikers walking along Hadrian’s Wall found the 150-year old tree lying forlornly across a section of the wall, built nearly 2,000 years earlier during the Roman occupation of Britain.

The tree, a sycamore, had been planted around 1870 by a previous landowner, Newcastle lawyer John Clayton (1792–1890). It’s thanks to him that so much of Hadrian’s Wall is preserved. Originally a 70-mile long barrier between Roman Britain to the south and unconquered Picts to the north, it was built under the orders of Roman Emperor Hadrian between AD 122 and 127. In Clayton’s day, the dressed stone was a handy source of building material for local farmhouses, which he evidently put a stop to. Today, about 20 miles of stone wall remains, mostly about 4-foot high, compared to its original height of 20 feet.

The “Robin Hood Tree” moniker resulted from the 1991 Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which the location of the tree, “Sycamore Gap,” made for a worthy location for the legendary outlaw, despite being nearly 200 miles from Sherwood Forest.

A huge outpouring of grief and anger followed the act of vandalism. People reminisced about being engaged, and wedded, there, visiting the tree with their kids, taking selfies there, scattering the ashes of loved ones around its roots. It won Britain’s “Tree of the Year” award in 2016. Anyone hiking the wall, as we did two years ago, knows the spot well — Sycamore Gap is a natural dip caused by melting glacial waters thousands of years ago. Britain’s National Trust, an organization devoted to heritage preservation, now owns the wall and adjacent land.

If newspaper reports are to be believed, the question on everyone’s mind was, Can the tree be saved? It takes 150 years or more for a sycamore to grow to a decent height — the felled tree was about 100 foot high — but maybe there’s still enough life left in the stump for it to rejuvenate. A National Trust manager said that the tree could possibly regrow in “coppiced” form, and that seeds had been collected to propagate saplings.

Coppicing is a process that’s been used for thousands of years in which a tree is cut down to a stump that, in certain species, encourages new shoots to grow. Some years later the coppiced tree is harvested and the process begins again. (A copse is a woodland in which trees are harvested in sections on a rotation.) Birch can be coppiced for firewood on a four-year cycle, while oaks are typically coppiced every 50 years. Curiously, a tree that is regularly coppiced doesn’t die of old age, since the process keeps it at a juvenile stage.

Closer to home, last March the City of Eureka saw fit to chop down what, in my mind, was its most beautiful tree, the old plane tree just down Second Street from the Carson Mansion. Except they didn’t cut it down completely, they pollarded it. Pollarding is a similar process to coppicing, except that the tree is cut at a higher level to prevent animals from grazing on the new shoots. In the case of my beloved plane tree, it seems to have worked spectacularly well — see the photos immediately following it being cut and now, after a few months of vibrant growth. (We’re left with the question, why the City cut it in the first place, with no opportunity for public input or discussion. A worker I spoke to insisted it was dying, but the current luxuriant display betrays that lie.)

For a city that prides itself on being at the heart of the redwoods, we’re starved of trees, and even when new saplings are planted (many by the local citizens’ group Keep Eureka Beautiful), they’re often destroyed by vandalism — check out the sad shape of the ten trees we planted, twice (!), behind the Red Lion on 3rd Street.

Meanwhile, what I think of as the Carson Mansion tree is enjoying a new lease on life. I only hope Britain’s Robin Hood tree will respond as well to the vicious insult visited upon it.

Environmental activists are concerned with the direction of the Humboldt County Climate Action Plan. The Plan, a to-do list of sorts describing what local jurisdictions can do to reach state-mandated greenhouse gas reductions, has been in development for five years and at a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, Planning Director John Ford warned that significant changes to the plan are necessary, delaying adoption of the plan even further.

Caroline Griffith of the Northcoast Environmental Center and Colin Fiske of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities join host Tom Wheeler of EPIC to discuss what modifications and delay mean for meaningful efforts to address the climate crisis.

The donkey that finally ousted oxen from the skidroads of the West was not a beast but a small steam engine. It was called a “donkey,” after a ship’s auxiliary engine, because the man who invented it in 1881, a mechanical genius named John Dolbeer, had been a naval engineer before turning to logging. The loggers agreed with the name “donkey engine” because early models, though mighty, looked too puny to the loggers to be dignified with a rating in horsepower.

John Dolbeer, inventor of the donkey engine which revolutionized logging.

One day in August 1881, a mechanical monster smaller than any locomotive but bulkier than a yoke of oxen appeared in the redwoods near Eureka. It sat on heavy wooden skids and consisted of an upright wood-burning boiler with a stovepipe on top, and a one-cylinder engine that drove a revolving horizontal drive-shaft with a capstan-like spool at each end for winding rope. The power of this first steam donkey was small, so several blocks had to be employed to increase the pull; moreover, the hemp rope used was not overly strong and tended to stretch, especially when wet. These factors kept down the distances logs could be pulled. In addition, the design of this first model was such that the directions from which logs could be pulled were limited. Nevertheless, Dolbeer considered the tests a success and patented his invention soon after.

On Dolbeer’s maiden model, patented in April 1882, a manila rope 150 feet long and four-and-a-half inches in diameter was wrapped several times around a gypsy head: a revolving metal spool mounted on a horizontal shaft. The loose end was carried out to a log and attached to it. Then, with a head of steam built up in the high-pressure boiler, the spool revolved and the incoming rope hauled the log toward the donkey.

The Dolbeer Steam Logging Machine would be recorded as the greatest labor saver in the industry’s history and changed logging for all time. In a high lead setup with its steel cable running through a pulley near the top of a towering spar tree a huffing donkey could yank the mightiest log out of the woods in minutes, and a sharp crew could handle 5,000 tons of logs in eight hours.

Operating an early Dolbeer donkey required the services of three men, a boy and a horse. The “choke setter” attached the line to a log; an engineer or “donkey puncher”, tended the steam engine; and a “spool tender” guided the whirring line over the spool with a short stick. The boy, called a “whistle punk”, manned a communicating wire running from the choker setter’s position out among the logs to a steam whistle on the donkey engine. When the choker setter had secured the log to the line running from the spool, the whistle punk tugged his whistle wire as a signal to the engineer that the log was ready to be hauled in. As soon as one log was in, or “yarded” it was detached from the line; then the horse hauled the line back from the donkey engine to the waiting choker setter and the next log.

The horse was replaced by a simple improvement called a “haulback line”. The haulback line was joined to the main line, and the two were converted into a long loop, the far end of which traveled through a pulley block anchored in a tree stump. Out among the felled trees the choker setter fastened a noose of cable around a log and attached it to the main line; the noose “choked” the log securely when the line from the donkey engine grew taut and began to pull. When the log reached the yard and was released the haulback line pulled the main line over the spool and drug it back into the timber.

It is apparent that John Dolbeer gave the donkey engine its first real tryout in the Humboldt County woods. This item about “Steam Power” appeared in Andrew Genzoli’s “Lines From the Times,” a recopy from The Humboldt Times, dated July 31, 1881.

The report said:

Steam Power—It’s application to logging business: To those whoare familiar with the logging woods, or who have been accustomed all their lives to see the unwieldy ox-team tugging at the great logs, the announcement that steam power is to supersede this antiquated method will be received with no little surprise and incredulity.

But improvement is the order of the day and there is no reason why the ox team should not make the way for the steam engine as the stage coach has the engine.

George D. Gray of the Milford Land and Lumber Company has brought up from San Francisco and set to work on the company’s logging claims at Salmon Creek, a steam logging engine that bids fair to change very considerably our system of logging. The idea of such a contrivance was laughed at by practical men and when the machine was set down among the crew at Salmon Creek, it was pronounced utterly impracticable.

But the inventor had faith in the new machine and put it in motion last week. It has performed its work to perfection from the first and is now a regular hand in the Salmon Creek woods. The machine is designed to be used in blocking out roads, hauling out of the way all waste material and hauling logs into the roads and coupling them together ready for the ox team to take away. It consists of an upright boiler and engine. The crank shaft of the engine is geared into a “gypsy head.” The whole set on a heavy wooden frame, is twelve feet long by six feet wide.

The gypsy projects over one side of the frame. The weight of the whole machine with water and fuel is about four tons, and it has sufficient power to break a four-and-half-inch manila rope.

The operation of the machine is very simple. After running the rigging the same as for an ox team, a few turns of the line are thrown over the gypsy and the engines started. Besides being more powerful than the ox team, the power can be used or halted instantly. A log can be rolled up on its side and held there by the brake, to be peeled or “sniped”, or for any other work that may be necessary.

The machine is the invention of John Dolbeer.

Over the next decades donkey engines evolved far beyond the stage of Dolbeer’s initial fragile invention. Donkeys were mounted on barges to herd rafts of logs, “road donkeys” pulled logs along skidroads, and “bull donkeys” lowered entire trains of log cars down steep inclines. All of these descendants took advantage of another sophisticated invention: the wire cable, metal cable had been available since the Civil War, but Dolbeer did not use it with his early donkey engines because it kinked and often snapped. But manila ropes, especially when wet stretched and were too hard to handle for hauls of more than 200 feet. By the 1890’s strong steel cable, winding and unwinding on rapidly turning drums, gave the donkey engine a pulling range of 1,500 feet, along with the strength to do just about anything that needed doing in the woods. Loggers learned to “road” the logs hundreds upon hundreds of yards from one donkey to another along the entire length of the skidroad.

Donkey engines kept getting bigger and more versatile. There were two-drum and three-drum donkeys able to haul logs from the woods over high wires, donkeys that loaded logs on railroad cars, and landing donkeys that pulled logs to river or lake landings. In 1902 the donkey even became a steamboat. On Mendocino’s Big River, one lumber company launched a converted lighter with a donkey çngine that turned a stern wheel; christened S.S. Maru, it was used to herd large “rafts” of logs downriver.

At first only the larger, more adequately financed logging operations used steam donkeys and similar power equipment but by the late nineties even the operators of small shows were coming over.

Considering costs, one logging operator commented about the donkey engine: “It don’t cost anything to keep it and you don’t have to feed it when it is not earning anything.” Steam donkeys not only got logs out of the woods more cheaply, they also made it possible to log when it was too muddy for bull teams to work. By the turn of the century, there were 293 donkey engines in use in Washington, 35 in Oregon and 61 in California. Thirty-five of the latter were in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. Though in time the donkey eliminated most of the horses and bulls, it gave jobs to many men. Before the coming of John Dolbeer’s spark-spewing marvel, a score or so of men might make up a logging crew; afterward, with production highballing along, a camp of 200 men or more was not unusual.

The donkey remained the power of the forests until the internal combustion engine arrived.

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The story above was originally printed in the March-April 1982 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.

Tuesday, October 24, 2023, at the age of 95, the magical, hilarious, spectacular Hazel Juell passed away.

She was born the third of seven children and raised on her family’s farm in Coudersport, Penn. After skipping two grades she graduated high school at 16 and took off solo to California to join her sister and uncle.

She acquired work and enrolled in Humboldt College. She found college didn’t captivate her; higher education would have to wait. She had met Leonard Juell and he captured her heart. Together they created an amazing life for the next 62 years.

She would tell you that she was a life-long learner. I would add that she was an entrepreneur, the center and matriarch of our family, and in all areas of her life she built community. Her answer to loneliness or a need in a new community was to create a social group. In Korbel it was a beer brewing group in her basement (probably illegal then). In Leggett she started a sewing group and a Sunday school. Then she saw the need for a church and organized the locals to build the First Presbyterian Church of Leggett.

With an infant, a toddler, and a young child, she packed up the family and moved to Leggett from Korbel to open and run The Famous One Log House, a gift shop along the Redwood Highway. Leonard had always wanted to be a business owner but he was still teaching school so in her competent manner, she orchestrated the move herself. For years she ran her successful business, raised her three children, and was supportive and active in her church and community. At 35, she surprised Leonard with their forth and last child.

As her children aged and became more independent her quest for higher education became a priority again. She went back to Humboldt State University and graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree side by side with her oldest daughter, Jeanette. Then it was on to her Master’s in psychology so she could pursue her career as a marriage, family and child Counselor. So many people have benefited from her sage advice, 50 minutes per session.

Ever-present, the drive for knowledge energized her to pursue her Doctorate at University of San Francisco. To whooping cheers from her family, she walked across the stage and accepted the award for Dissertation of the Year for her doctoral thesis.

Now with her career in full swing, she looked for a community amongst her peers. She leased a large victorian in Eureka and started Bayview Institute, a group practice of therapists and a place of healing and camaraderie. At the age of 86 she finally retired her practice and settled into a life of gardening, bridge, writings groups, church choir, deep conversations with many friends accompanied by her famous Manhattans.

She loved to share ideas, cherished her many “talking companions,” and loved everything that grows, from personal growth, emotional growth, friendships, and babies, to her vast variety of succulents and begonias.

She was preceded in death by her husband Leonard Juell, her parents, and five siblings. She is survived by: her sister Mary Gage, her four children Stacey Juell (Sue), Jeanette Addis (Mike), Greg Juell (Barb), and Kristine Juell, her five grandchildren Tara Juell, Addie Juell, Ericskon Juell (Shaena), Sara Felsenthal (Noah), and Ben Trump, and two great grandchildren Alder and Coen Felsenthal.

Public viewing will be November 1, 2023 from 4 to 7 p.m. at Paul’s Mortuary in Arcata. A funeral service will be held at her church, the Arcata Presbyterian Church on November 2, 2023, at 12:30 p.m. with internment immediately following at Greenview Cemetery in Arcata. All her beloved friends and family are welcome to attend.

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Previously: A New Cap on Airbnbs? County Planning Commission Hears Public Feedback on Proposed Short-Term Rental Ordinance

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It looks like it’s going to be another few weeks before the Humboldt County Planning Commission makes a final decision on proposed regulations for short-term vacation rentals.

Commissioners had hoped to come to a consensus by the end of Thursday’s meeting, but, alas, after more than three and a half hours of going through the draft ordinance section by section, the commission unanimously voted to continue its discussion at its next meeting on Nov. 2.

The proposed rules would provide a regulatory framework for the permitting and operation of short-term rentals – defined as the rental of a dwelling for 30 consecutive days or less through services such as Airbnb or Vrbo – in unincorporated areas of Humboldt County. The regulations seek to protect neighborhood integrity and prevent the loss of available housing, while also providing tourists with more accommodation options and economic opportunities for property owners who aren’t interested in renting to long-term tenants.

Of the 34,093 residential units in unincorporated Humboldt County, approximately 567, or 1.66 percent, are being used as short-term rentals. To ensure short-term rentals don’t overwhelm the Humboldt Bay region, where housing availability is already impacted, the total number of permits would be capped at two percent of the total housing stock.

The draft ordinance would also establish standards for the operation of short-term rentals to mitigate neighborhood impacts, such as noise and parking issues.

Operators with proof of pre-existing operations would be given priority under the proposed rules. 

“No permits for whole dwelling unit Short-term Rentals shall be issued during the first two months following the effective date of this section but applications from individuals operating existing short-term rentals will be received,” according to the text of the ordinance. “Two Three months after the effective date of this ordinance the department will issue permits for qualifying locations with existing Short-term Rentals. … If the number of permits issued for existing Short-term Rentals exceeds the cap … then no permits will be issued for new Short-term Rentals until the number of permitted Short-term Rentals in the County falls below the cap.”

During a recent public hearing on the matter, the commission asked staff to include a provision in the ordinance that would prevent operators with unresolved violations on the property from being permitted. “Violations which have been remedied will be allowed the same pathway forward as other operators,” the ordinance states. “Properties where violations exist will not be considered for [rentals].”

The Planning Commission agreed to hear public comment before deliberating on any of the proposed changes. Overall, public opinion of the draft document was fairly mixed.

Layal Bata, a policy and research analyst with the Los Angeles-based housing advocacy group Better Neighbors, asked the Planning Commission to reduce the suggested two percent cap on short-term rentals to one percent of the total housing stock and to prohibit short-term rentals from operating within a multi-family structure.

“Like many counties throughout California, Humboldt is facing a housing affordability crisis,” she said. “In the City of Los Angeles, we’ve seen firsthand how short-term rentals have contributed to rising housing costs. According to a McGill University report published last year, short-term rentals have contributed to an increase in rents by $810 and have taken 2,500 homes off the long-term market since 2015. Meanwhile, in Humboldt County, rents have increased $250 since 2015, with the number of unhosted short-term rentals [in the coastal zone] increasing to 25 percent since 2022.”

Arcata resident Raelina Krikston asked commissioners to eliminate short-term rentals without a caretaker resident, meaning someone who lives on the property they are renting out.

“In doing so this would open up hundreds if not thousands of homes up to first-time homebuyers and long-term renters in our community who currently need homes and are seeking upward home mobility,” she said. “[T]he number of short-term rentals in our county represents a significant portion of our housing stock that is being lost to commercial ventures. Based on our current [Regional Housing Needs Allocation] RHNA, 3,390 new homes are needed and the current number of [short-term rentals] in our county [is] equivalent to 26 percent of our RHNA needs.”

Krikston also spoke in favor of limiting short-term rentals to one per individual or business as opposed to five. She also expressed support for an overall cap of one percent.

Speaking to the other side of the issue, Southern Humboldt resident Chip Titman said short-term rentals offer “a lifeline” to rural communities where housing availability isn’t a pressing issue.

“They are an economic engine for tourism and a pathway beyond the dying cannabis economy,” he said. “Please don’t over-regulate the rural short-term rental operators, forcing them out of business and increasing the economic slide in rural and Southern Humboldt.”

McKinleyville resident and short-term rental operator Seth Naman said short-term rentals offer a cheaper option for folks visiting the area.

“If you want to stay at the Holiday Inn [by the airport] on a weekend in August [of 2024], that’s going to cost you $304 for one night [and] one room,” he said. “Like it or not, we are a tourist area. … People want to come here and they don’t want to stay in a hotel room, they want to have a more organic experience at a short-term stay. … A lot of us short-term rental operators, we live here, we’re in the community, we spend our money here, raise our kids here and the income that’s generated from the short-term rentals really is a part of how we get by.”

Several other commenters spoke, touching on many of the same issues. 

Before delving into the document, Commissioner Iver Skavdal acknowledged the “overall lack of housing” in Humboldt County. “[There is] a lot of concern which I also share.”

Skavdal

“We don’t have many tools in our toolkit, so it seems like people are grabbing on to this short-term rental regulation as perhaps one opportunity to solve that problem. Personally, I think it’s not,” Skavdal said. “Frankly, we’re not building houses in Humboldt County right now, which is the problem. … The last 10-year average, we’ve built about 115 single-family dwellings a year – about .33 percent of the housing stock. … I think we need to turn our attention to what’s causing what’s the difficulty. Why are we not building new homes in Humboldt County?”

Commissioner Sarah West said she felt short-term rental regulations could serve as a “tool in the toolbox when it comes to housing,” but agreed that the construction of more housing should be a priority. “While I don’t think it’s a solution to our housing struggles, it does impact our housing availability and we ought [to] have some sideboards on converting housing into businesses.”

Commissioner Thomas Mulder asked fellow commissioners to avoid putting unnecessary or unfair restrictions on short-term rental operators that wouldn’t apply to long-term renters.

Mulder

“If we heavily regulate one end, that doesn’t mean another end that’s already regulated isn’t providing the needs through the appropriate regulations as it is,” he said, seemingly referring to rules already implemented through Airbnb or VRBO.

Commissioner Peggy O’Neil expressed sympathy for both sides of the issue, noting that she’s “all for supporting people who want to live in our community to have a source of income on their property,” but said she didn’t want to see outside investors buying up properties to turn into short-term rentals that will price out local folks.

“Or even expensive long-term rentals that are pricing people out of living in Humboldt County or having to radically change their lifestyle so that they can’t have a single-family home,” she said. “They have to rent a bedroom or they’re facing homelessness because they can’t afford rent anymore. It’s ridiculous. If you don’t already have a home, good luck getting one. Even if you’re a school teacher or work for a service district, you can’t even afford a house anymore.”

Commissioner Lonyx Landry said it took him three months to find a rental that he was “overqualified for” when moving back to Humboldt County in recent years.

From there, the commission spent two-and-a-half hours going through the ordinance section by section. They approved a few sections of the ordinance but got caught up talking about who and what would qualify as a home share rental.

As the meeting hit the three-and-a-half-hour mark, commissioners agreed to wrap up the discussion. Ford suggested the commission continue the discussion and finish its review of the draft ordinance at its next meeting on Nov. 2. Staff will come back with the final revisions on Nov. 16. 

Landry made a motion to that effect, which was seconded by Mulder. The motion passed in a unanimous 6-0 vote, with Commissioner Brian Mitchell absent.

PREVIOUSLY:

• “Scanner Traffic Indicates,” Oct. 26

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On 10/26/2023, at about 8:45 pm, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputies were on patrol in the area of the US Highway 101 and Highway 36 interchange. A Toyota truck, known to the Deputies to have been used in the commission of a recent burglary and vehicle theft, was observed traveling northbound on Sandy Prairie Road, Alton. The Deputies attempted a traffic enforcement stop and the truck fled, prompting a short pursuit.

Previousl Miller booking photo:

The pursuit was discontinued when the truck began traveling on US Hwy 101, southbound in the northbound travel lanes. The truck proceeded at a slow rate of speed to the area of US Hwy 101 and Metropolitan Road when the truck experienced mechanical failure and came to a stop. HCSO Deputies, assisted by Fortuna Police and Rio Dell Police Officers, established a traffic closure on the highway and deployed spike strips to further contain the truck. The driver of the truck, identified as 34-year-old Clayton Miller of Fortuna, was uncooperative with Deputies/ Officers and a K9 unit was deployed during his apprehension.

Miller was medically cleared at Redwood Memorial Hospital prior to being booked at the Humboldt County Correctional Facility for the following violations:

• VC 2800.4 – Fleeing/ Evading a Peace Officer; Against Traffic
• PC 22810 – Illegal Possession of Tear Gas
• PC 148(a)(1) – Obstruct Resist a Public Officer, HS 11377(a) – Possession of a Controlled Substance
• PC 459 – Burglar
• yPC 487(a) – Grand Theft
• PC 496(a) – Receive Stolen Property, VC 10851(a) – Vehicle Theft
• PC 12022.1 – Commit Felony while on Bail.

This case is still under investigation.

Miller was out of custody on bail from a March arrest for a violation of

• PC 664/187 – Attempted Homicide, PC 246 – Shooting at an Inhabited Dwelling
• PC 245(a)(2) – Assault with a Firearm, among other charges.

Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s.

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Press release from the Fortuna Union High School District:

The Fortuna Union High School Music Program is thrilled to announce a generous donation of $1.2 million from the Alice Gunnerson Trust. This monumental contribution, aimed at securing the future of music education at Fortuna Union High School, will establish a fund to support the program in perpetuity.

Alice Gunnerson, from her obituary.

Alice Gunnerson, a lifelong advocate for the arts and a dedicated supporter of Fortuna Union High School, has left an indelible mark on the community with this extraordinary gift. Her commitment to the enrichment of students’ lives through music education will continue to resonate through generations of budding musicians and artists.

The funds from the Alice Gunnerson Trust will be used to enhance the music program’s offerings, including the purchase of new instruments, upgrading facilities, supporting Fortuna High’s talented music instructor. In perpetuity, these resources will ensure that the Fortuna Union High School Music Program remains a vibrant and vital part of the educational experience for students.

Mrs. Gunnerson’s extraordinary generosity is not only an investment in music education but also a testament to the positive impact it can have on students’ lives. The school is deeply grateful for her dedication to fostering the arts in the community and for her enduring legacy.

To honor and thank Mrs. Gunnerson for her incredible generosity, Fortuna Union High School is in the process of planning a special dedication ceremony and other expressions of gratitude. The Fortuna Union High School Music Program recognizes that this significant donation will enable them to provide an exceptional music education experience for students now and into the future. It reaffirms the program’s commitment to nurturing the talents and passions of the next generation of musicians.

For more information about the Alice Gunnerson Trust donation and the Fortuna Union High School Music Program, please contact Clint Duey at 707-725-4462 or cduey@fuhsdistrict.net

About Fortuna Union High School: Fortuna Union High School, located in Fortuna, California, is a leading institution committed to providing comprehensive educational opportunities to students. The Fortuna Union High School Music Program plays a pivotal role in the cultural and artistic development of its students, and this generous donation from the Alice Gunnerson Trust will help secure its future for generations to come.