Charlie Goodyear also told me that there are 100 big trees per acre in the Grove, a density that increases the risk of crown fire and has to be reduced. But what I can see growing on the slopes of Lookout Mountain, which rise steeply from the riverbank, is way below that, 10 to 15 per acre max. Mancini has been taking local residents and influential environmentalists to the top of Lookout, where there are almost no redwoods. The sun, soil, and moisture conditions on hilltops are generally not favorable for redwoods. Most of them grow down in canyons. So Mancini was able to say—I got this from someone who took the local-resident tour—“See how few redwoods there are outside the main grove? Only 20 percent of the big trees in the Grove are redwoods.” Charlie told me 10 percent, and Sam Singer, in his last letter to the magazine, wrote, “Old growth redwood … comprise 5 percent or less of the total trees at Bohemian Grove.” Another figure he has briefed the media with is that only 1.5 percent of the trees in the Grove are going to be cut. What has already been done appears to be “really shitty forestry,” says a former valet at one of the camps, one of two people I spoke with who have gone out and seen it. “They just laid waste to Kitchen Creek”—site of the last T.H.P. harvest. The other, a local resident, says he found big redwoods in draws marked for cutting.

The top of Lookout, my informant told me, looked more like a park than a forest, because most of the big firs had been taken out, several within the last few years. Mancini portrayed it as typical of the rest of the property. (There are actually six different forest types on it, some of them dominated by redwoods.) This is what we’re up against if we’re going to restore the redwood forest that used to be here, Mancini told the tour, waving at the dense jungle of understory trees and shrubs that had shot up in the absence of the big trees. “We have to clear out the dead tan oak and the rest of this stuff. It’s very labor-intensive and expensive. It’s going to cost $7,000 an acre, so to finance it we have to take out a few big trees.”

That’s the other new rationale for the N.T.M.P. It’s like Tanzania’s wildlife service selling permits, at thousands of dollars a pop, to blow away an elephant or a lion in order to finance its elephant-and-lion-protection program. Why not just charge the members $80 a year?

Mancini told the local-resident tour that the annual timber harvest is going to be scaled down to about 750,000 board feet, but this is still “dead on arrival,” as far as Jock is concerned. “It’s like negotiating how many military bases you are going to be allowed to keep in Iraq,” he told me. “They start with a high figure, a million board feet and counting, as a bargaining position, so we can feel O.K. with their upping the harvest by 100 to 150 percent. But look at the damage that the past harvests have done.”

This is exactly what I am planning to do. Tomorrow, if all goes well, I am going to hike to the scene of the last timber harvest, which was in 2005, at Kitchen Creek. The former valet, who liked to walk in the woods, stumbled onto it and told me it was a massacre: “It turned my stomach, and my whole attitude about the club, that it could be letting this happen.” From there I will go to Bull Barn and Mount Heller, where the first harvest under the N.T.M.P. is slated to take place. This should take four to six hours, during which I’d be able to survey enough terrain to form a ballpark impression of how many big redwoods there are overall.