Enter the preserve from the Rio Road side, across from the Carmel Mission Basilica, and the trail does what it has always done. Redwood mulch underfoot, coast live oaks arching overhead, the creek bed running quiet beside you until winter rain fills it. A few hundred yards in, through a gap in the pines, you catch the gables of a Tudor Revival house behind a chain-link fence. It has been there the whole time. It looks like it always looks: shuttered, still, waiting for something that never quite arrives.
Most people who walk this loop weekly assume the whole 34 acres runs on the same clock, city-maintained, city-decided, moving at whatever pace city government moves. That assumption is wrong in a specific and useful way. One part of this preserve is actively, successfully cared for by people who show up on Saturdays with loppers and mowers. The other part, the mansion at its center, has been stuck in the same argument for most of the last decade. Understanding why one thing works and the other doesn't tells you more about how this neighborhood actually functions than any trail map does.
A Park the City Never Quite Finished Deciding On
Mission Trail Nature Preserve wasn't designed. It was assembled. The city of Carmel-by-the-Sea acquired the land in the early 1970s and didn't formally designate it a nature preserve for passive recreation until 1979. What resulted is a half-mile wooded canyon carved by a seasonal tributary of the Carmel River, holding five distinct habitats within a single 34-acre footprint: Monterey pine forest, coast live oak woodland, wetland, willow riparian corridor, and coastal prairie. It is also, according to the preserve's own volunteer stewards, the last place in Carmel where naturally occurring Monterey pine and coast live oak forest still grow together.
That density of habitat comes with a cost most walkers never think about. The state has designated the preserve a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, and it provides habitat for the federally endangered Yadon's rein-orchid along with several other species tracked by the California Native Plant Society. A forest this old, surrounded on all sides by residential streets, does not stay walkable on its own. It needs someone pulling invasive growth and clearing fuel loads year after year, and for most of the preserve's history, that someone has not been the city itself.
The Second Saturday Crew
That work falls to Friends of Mission Trail Nature Preserve, a nonprofit formed in 2009 and recognized by the city as an official volunteer support group in 2014. Its members call themselves the Weedies, and they meet on the second Saturday of every month to do the unglamorous labor that keeps the forest from closing in on itself. The group's restoration projects are led by board vice president Greg D'Ambrosio, a former Carmel city forester who brings decades of hands-on experience in invasive plant removal and fire mitigation to a job that never really ends.
The scope of that job became clear after the winter storms of 2023 and 2024, which brought down enough trees to require trail repairs throughout the preserve. The rains that followed left grasses growing thick across the open ground, so the Weedies hired a landscape crew to mow the fire fuel down to safe levels and pulled invasive poison hemlock wherever it appeared. Working alongside the city's forestry department, they removed more than 40 invasive acacia trees, on top of the more than 1,400 eucalyptus the partnership has cleared over the years. None of that required a City Council vote. It required a monthly commitment and a working relationship with city staff, and that was enough.
What the Weedies actually do most months:
- Trail clearance and repair after storm damage
- Fire fuel abatement across open grass areas
- Removal of invasive species, including acacia and poison hemlock
- Fence and signage replacement throughout the preserve
If you've noticed the trail staying clear and the underbrush staying manageable, this is why.
The Mansion That Time Skipped
The other project sharing this acreage has a longer and stranger history. In 1925, architect Henry Higby Gutterson designed a two-story Tudor Revival house for Paul and Grace Flanders, built from interlocking precast concrete blocks for a total cost of $17,500. It sat on 80 acres the Flanders family had purchased from Dr. Daniel T. MacDougal, on a hill with views toward the Mission and Point Lobos. It remains the only known Gutterson design in the region.
By 1967, the Flanders heirs were planning to subdivide the property into 64 residential units. The city said no, and in 1972, then vice mayor Gunnar Norberg led a campaign to buy the mansion and its surrounding 14.9 acres for $275,000, a figure worth roughly $2.1 million in 2025 dollars. That purchase folded the estate into what became Mission Trail Nature Preserve. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. In between, it has served as a home for the Carmel Art Institute and sat vacant for long stretches, including a period in the 1980s when a sitting mayor, Clint Eastwood, campaigned partly on tearing it down because it wasn't generating revenue for the city.
It's still standing. It's still empty.
The Group That Wants to Fix It, and the Council That Keeps Saying Not Yet
The most recent attempt to change that traces back to a 2018 city request for proposals seeking a residential curator, someone willing to live in the mansion in exchange for restoring and maintaining it. Filmmaker Mike Buffo, founder of the Carmel production company House of 8 Media, applied then and didn't get it. He and his wife Brittney kept working the idea, filed a revised proposal on January 31, 2023, and on December 1, 2023, formally incorporated their effort as Carmel Outlands, a nonprofit built around restoring the mansion as a small cultural and educational venue with public access, an interpretive nature center, and a rotating display of local art.
On February 27, 2025, Buffo presented the City Council with a specific offer: $61,125 in in-kind contributions from local contractors to run a full feasibility study, covering structural assessments, 3D scans, and hard cost estimates, all at no expense to the city and with every finding becoming city property regardless of outcome. The response was not a rejection so much as a stall. Assistant City Administrator Brandon Swanson raised concerns about staff oversight and noted that Carmel Outlands would not be named the property's official developer even if the study went forward. Councilmember Hans Buder said the year already had too many competing priorities to take on. Councilmember Allisandra Dramov questioned whether a study run by an outside group could be trusted as unbiased. The offer carried a 60-day window that closed on April 25, 2025. The council took no further action, and by its own account, Carmel Outlands paused its restoration push to wait for renewed interest from the city. That is where the record stands as of this writing.
Same 34 Acres, No Conversation
Here's the detail that reframes everything above it. In early February 2025, Carmel Outlands reached out to Friends of Mission Trail Nature Preserve to propose working together, presumably to align their overlapping missions on the same overlapping ground. The invitation was turned down.
Two organizations, occupying the same physical footprint, both claiming a version of the same goal, are not talking to each other. One group asks the city for permission to touch a building it doesn't own and keeps getting deferred. The other group asks the city for nothing but a working relationship and keeps producing results.
| Friends of Mission Trail Nature Preserve | Carmel Outlands | |
|---|---|---|
| Formed | 2009 | December 1, 2023 |
| Standing with the city | Official volunteer support group since 2014 | Seeking a lease or curatorship, not yet approved |
| What's been delivered | 40+ invasive acacia trees removed, ongoing fire fuel mowing, storm-damage trail repairs, monthly work parties | A detailed master plan and a feasibility study offer the council declined to act on |
| What it required from the city | A working partnership with city forestry staff | City Council approval, still pending |
What It Means for the Walk You're Already Taking
None of this changes what the trail feels like underfoot. The Weedies will be out again on the second Saturday of this month doing the same quiet maintenance they've done for years, and the preserve will keep looking the way it has always looked to anyone walking it after work or on a Sunday morning. The mansion will still be fenced off, and there is no city timeline, published or implied, for when that changes. If you've wondered why one half of this preserve seems to run like clockwork while the other half looks frozen, the answer isn't neglect. It's that one group asked for cooperation and the other is still waiting on permission.
If you want to see the working half up close, Friends of Mission Trail Nature Preserve posts its monthly work party schedule on its own site, and new volunteers are welcome without prior experience. If you want to follow the mansion's next move, Carmel Outlands keeps a public timeline of its own, though the most recent entry still dates to March 2025, well over a year old at this point.
Truszkowski Freedman & Associates pays attention to the quieter parts of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the volunteer meetings and council agendas that shape daily life here long before they ever show up in a listing description. If you're curious what else is moving beneath the surface in this neighborhood, or anywhere else on the Peninsula, we're glad to talk.
