Deal protects redwood forest

Group’s pact with ranch allows for some continued logging

SAN FRANCISCO — A redwood forest north of San Francisco has received permanent protection under a deal between a Bay Area environmental group and a family who has owned it since 1925.

Under the agreement, Save the Redwoods League paid $24.7 million to buy a conservation easement over the Mailliard Ranch, about 80 miles north of San Francisco in Mendocino County, the Mercury News reported Friday.

The nearly 15,000-acre property belongs to the Mailliard family, which includes Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, wife of former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, who died Feb. 6 in Palo Alto.

The forest will not be open to the public. The family will continue to own the property and be allowed to conduct commercial logging at half the rate permitted under state laws on second-growth redwoods there, as it has done for generations. But more than 1,000 acres of land will be preserved, while 69 legal parcels that could have been divided into ranchettes and vineyards will be retired.

“Our vision isn’t to make a park out of every acre of redwood forest,” said Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League. “We want to make sure we don’t lose any more of it.”

The ranch is in Anderson Valley, between Yorkville and Boonville.

It is about 10 miles inland from the coastal town of Gualala, which sits on the border of Sonoma and Mendocino counties. The property is home to golden eagles, black-tailed deer, northern spotted owls, Coho salmon and steelhead trout, with at least 159 native species of plants.

It also includes 28 miles of streams and the headwaters of the Garcia and Navarro rivers.

The ranch was in an area of California that was being heavily logged when Jack Ward Mailliard Jr., and his wife, Kate, purchased it in 1925. A friend of former Gov. Earl Warren, Mailliard also served as president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the board of the California Academy of Sciences. Kate Mailliard revered the trees, particularly an area known as Cathedral Grove, her grandson remembers.

“The old growth built San Francisco twice, so there isn’t a lot of redwood, true old growth, left in the area,” said Larry Mailliard, general partner of Mailliard Ranch. “Cathedral Grove was my grandmother’s favorite. Grandmother’s philosophy was, ‘Why go sit in a 100-year-old church when I could go talk to a 2,500-year-old tree?’”