In September, 2004 King County and Hancock Timber Resources Group, the company that operates what's known as the Snoqualmie Tree Farm, signed a historic document that will keep 90,000 acres as a working forest. That's an area twice the size of Seattle.

The agreement was one of the largest public purchases of development rights in the Pacific Northwest and one of the biggest such contracts in U.S. History. Under the county's current zoing, the forest could have been broken into smaller plots for development.

Click here to read the Puget Sound Business Journal's article on the Tree Farm.