The fire threat to the rural Auburn area’s 1,200-acre Hidden Falls Regional Park is being met head-on with an aggressive shaded-fuel-break strategy that will create a thinned-out forest perimeter.

At the same time, work is taking place to make the county park safer and more accessible to visitors – with improved trails and a wooden deck with railings overlooking its signature 30-foot-high falls.

With a $506,000 grant from the Sierra Nevada Conservancy’s Prop. 84 conservation coffers, Placer County’s Department of Facility Services is moving ahead on plans to create fire-safe fuel breaks on about 94 acres of the park.

Much of the work will take place on already-established ranch roads, with an 8-mile-long cleared zone totaling 14 acres around the perimeter of the park to provide firefighting access.

Supervisor Robert Weygandt, vice-chairman of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy board, said that the grant is indicative of the work the conservancy is doing in providing publicly funded grants for worthy causes in the Sierra. The first round of funding this spring provided a total of $17 million in funding.

“It has been better than my best expectations,” Weygandt said. “The results of this agency making investments with local communities are going to be amazing.”

The grant will also allow the purchase of an all-terrain mower for the creation and maintenance of grassland clearings.

As well as protecting wildlife habitat, providing a fire buffer for neighboring properties and reducing the park’s risk of wildfire, the project will provide a buffer zone to keep fire from spreading into the environmentally sensitive Coon Creek and Deadman Creek watersheds on the property.

Washington Ridge inmate camp crews from Nevada County have already started on some of the fuel reduction work while California Conservation Corps members who had been working on Hidden Creek projects have been called to firefighting support duties around the state.

John Ramirez, county parks administrator, said that work will resume again on the falls’ overlook deck when corps members return to the area. The framework has been installed but the falls viewing area has remained closed through the summer because the area is still a construction zone.

Hidden Falls project manager Andy Fisher said the work is part of ongoing efforts to improve a park that opened less than two years ago and is susceptible to fire because of its steep terrain.

About 220 acres of the park are now open for use and work is underway on a plan to open the remaining section to the public, with a possible new access point off Garden Bar Road as well as Mount Vernon Road.

The park could also be connected by trails to nearby open-space land purchases by the Placer Land Trust to create a 10-mile loop with spectacular views of the Sacramento Valley, Fisher added.

To visit the park, take Atwood Road west from Highway 49 in Auburn until it becomes Mount Vernon Road. Follow Mount Vernon Road to Mears Road. Turn right on Mears Road and follow to Mears Place. Park hours are from a half-hour before sunrise to a half-hour after sunset daily.

The Journal’s Gus Thomson can be reached at gust@goldcountrymedia.com.