page_title: Camp Pico Blanco
section_title: Dudley lousewort
hierarchical_section_title: Camp Pico Blanco / Environmental issues / Dudley lousewort
caption_attribution_description: A Dudley's lousewort near Portola State Park in San Mateo, California.
context_page_description: Camp Pico Blanco is an inactive camp of about 800 acres in the interior region of Big Sur in Central California. It is operated by the Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council, of the Boy Scouts of America, a new council formed as a result of a merger between the former Santa Clara County Council and the Monterey Bay Area Council in December 2012. The camp is surrounded by the Los Padres National Forest, the Ventana Wilderness, undeveloped private land owned by Graniterock, and is located astride the pristine Little Sur River. The land was donated to the Boy Scouts by William Randolph Hearst in 1948 and the camp was opened in 1955. The camp was closed following the Soberanes Fire in 2017, and has remained since then after Palo Colorado Road was severely damaged the following winter. Monterey County has been unable to budget the funds required to fix the road.
  The camp vicinity is an ecologically diverse and sensitive environment containing a number of unique animal and plant species. It is located at 800 feet elevation on the North Fork of the Little Sur River south of Carmel, California.
context_section_description: The camp environment supports a large population of the rare Dudley's lousewort at the site of the former Catholic Chapel. The former Monterey Bay Area Council was criticized for damaging the environment necessary to sustain the plant, which is protected by the California Native Plant Protection Act, the California Environmental Quality Act and the Little Sur River Protected Waterway Management Plan. The current Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council has invited naturalists and others to review their stewardship policies and actions.
  The species was named for 19th-century Stanford University botanist William Dudley. It only grows at the base of Douglas fir trees, relying on the tree's fungal network to obtain water, nitrogen and phosphorus. Fewer than 10 locations are known to support the plant, and the site within the camp contains about 50% of the known specimens.  Monterey County cited the former Monterey Bay Area Council in 1989 for their "repeated destruction of Dudley's lousewort and its habitat."
  Eagle Scout and science teacher Kim Kuska, who as a teenager once served as the camp's Nature Director, was helping the California Native Plant Society study the plant and to protect it beginning in the 1970s. When the council obtained a permit to remove 38 damaged trees after a fire in 2008, wood cuttings were left on top of the lousewort. Kuska meticulously documented the plant population and jealously guarded the plant. He received a permit from the California Department of Fish and Game to plant additional specimens of the plant, but only after he obtained the council's permission for locations within the camp's boundaries.
  When the council rebuffed his efforts to plant new specimens within the camp, Kuska contacted the Center for Investigative Reporting in the summer of 2012. They wrote an article describing the prior council's actions at the camp. Kuska was then informed by lawyers representing the Monterey Bay Area Council that he could only visit the camp under supervision. But in September 2012 they declined to renew his Scouting membership without explanation, effectively expelling him from the organization. Kuska says his membership wasn't renewed because he was a whistle-blower and exposed the Scouts' environmental carelessness. Ron Schoenmehl, director of support services for the council, said that Kuska had been planting lousewort in new, high-traffic areas near the camp's generator, health lodge, and camping area without the council's permission, which his permit required him to obtain. Since the council is obligated to protect the plant wherever it grows, Schoenmehl said that lousewort in those areas would restrict the camp's use of those areas.
caption: Dudley lousewort (Pedicularis dudleyi) growing near Portola Redwoods State Park.
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