looked into bequeathing my 192 acres into a conservancy trust, but found out that legally, they can do whatever with my property. This means they could log it, clear cut, make it a private hunting preserve or whatever. Here, I found the best thing as far as my wishes go is to keep it in the family and hope that they respect my wishes, rather than trust some supposedly nature oriented organization to leave it alone which is what I consider the right thing.
Your land sounds gorgeous.
I'm just posting to point out that leaving it to family members may be more likely to cause the result you don't want than leaving it to a nature conservancy. Here's why:
(1) Family members may be obligated to sell the land or part of it to pay estate and/or inheritance taxes, and generally the people who want to buy big tracts of land are developers, lumber companies, etc.--the exact kinds of people you don't want owning your lovely land; in contrast, leaving it to a nature conservancy nonprofit would avoid those taxes being imposed on it;
(2) Your family members may also find they can't afford the property taxes and be forced to sell it or part of it in order to pay them or get out from under that expense, whereas a nonprofit wouldn't have to pay property taxes;
(3) When the people you leave it to die, their heirs may have little to no interest in conservation AND little or no interest in respecting your wishes (since they may have never met you or not known you well), so within X amount of time after your death (and it could be very soon if any heir dies young), the land could be in the hands of someone who doesn't care about it the way you do;
(4) If you leave it to more than one person and those people
ever disagree about what to do with the land, one person could force a partition (legal division) of the land and sell their half (or third, quarter, whatever)--basically, if you leave it to more than one person, they all have to agree to keep it a nature preserve, and they all have to keep on agreeing, forever;
(5) Even if you only leave it to one person, if that person marries and then divorces, the land may be considered a marital asset and the court may order its sale, or its partition and partial sale; and of course, that problem multiplies if you leave it to more than one person.
Those are just the problems that strike me off the top of my head. To my mind, any of those scenarios is a good deal more likely than, say, the Sierra Club or whoever suddenly deciding to open a lumber company or whatever.