After that work calmed down, we didn’t have quite the appropriations we had, why, my job with the state was to go in and review some of the major park projects and do general development. You might call it master planning of these parks, along with additional land acquisition studies. We were getting limited appropriations for land acquisition. At Castle Crags, for instance, up by Mount Shasta, I was working on an arrangement with the Forest Service where I’d set up lands to be acquired, private lands, and then we would work out a tri-party exchange whereby some of the land that the state would purchase would be exchanged with the Forest Service for National Forest land that we integral to the state park development.
We had a program up at Lake Tahoe at Sugar Pine Point where there was a private estate owned by one of the early banking families of Los Angeles. This was about a 2,000-acre project. I had made a study of the Lake Tahoe Basin for land areas to be acquired for state parks. Sugar Pine Point was one of them that had excellent lake frontage and went back up into the canyons with ample opportunities for campground development, things of that nature. We were working out a tri-party arrangement with the Forest Service and the private owners to acquire land next to Emerald Bay at Cascade Lake, but that project fell through. Originally the Forest Service was to acquire the property through a timber exchange. They would exchange timber rights with a private timber company and that private timber company, in turn, would buy the property from the private owner and then it would be turned over to the state for a park. Well, we worked out a number of arrangements like that in the area on the north shore of the lake.
