But even with this surge of renewed enthusiasm, the South Grove situation remained difficult and full of complications. Drury concentrated heavily on completing the Forest Service exchange agreements covering the 1,200 acres of corridor lands. At the same time he was also pressing for completion of the surveys and appraisals that would make it possible to put precise values on the corridor lands for matching purposes and on the entire South Grove so that meaningful negotiations could be opened with the Pickering Lumber Company.
by Pickering that would have reduced the price of the South Grove area by allowing selective cutting of pine trees both around and inside the grove. An admirable attempt to clarify the state’s reaction to these proposals was written up by Frederick A. Meyer of the Division of Beaches and Parks. As the Division’s forest technician, Meyer was deeply involved in the South Grove negotiations and had earlier served as a special assistant to Frederick Law Olmsted in his 1945 park survey work at Calaveras and elsewhere throughout the State. In his report, Meyer pointed out that there was a very basic difference between “sustained-yield management” of forest lands for lumber production and the park objective which, in the case of the South Grove, was an attempt to preserve “an impressive natural feature” in its wild and primeval condition. Meyer explained that selective logging of pines in the valley of Big Trees Creek would have numerous undesirable side effects on the giant sequoias and on the general ecology of the area. In short, he concluded that within the logical and natural boundaries of the Big Trees Creek watershed, there should be a minimum of human intrusion and certainly no logging operations.
The major difficulty continued to be a lack of private matching funds. With some desperation, Drury went to Pickering with the Save the Redwoods League’s suggestion that the State pay $1.75 million for the South Grove on a year-byyear, unit-by-unit installment basis. But this approach was not at all appealing to Pickering executives, who took this opportunity to announce that not only the manner but also the amount of the offer was totally unacceptable. According to their estimations, the land and timber in the valley of Big Trees Creek were worth nearly five million dollars or, in other words, about three times the amount offered. Some state park officials found this response outrageous. One negotiator was quoted as saying, “It amounted to about five times the value of the timber involved.”
“The contention that the majority of trees in an old-growth forest are a liability is, from the park standpoint, entirely fallacious. Sugar pine trees are mature at about 200 or 250 years; but some of them will live to be 500 or 600 years, and possibly even older under the most favorable conditions. Reference to mature and over-mature trees as dead and dying is an unwarranted anticipation. If we were engaged in forest management, these trees would be an economic liability; they are overripe. But our parks must be neither woodlots nor tree
One underlying problem in this stage of the negotiations was that Pickering executives were unsympathetic to the concept of saving what they termed “old, overripe” sugar pines. These trees were extremely valuable as a source of lumber, but being old they were likely to become infested with pine beetles and be lost from both a lumberman’s point of view and, they insisted, from the park visitor’s point of view. This lumberman’s approach to the project resulted in proposals
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