Why don't you give it a rest, Mike? With you involved agreement will be impossible. Every two minutes you think you have it all figured out, so you launch into your sarcasm and your mocking half-truths and flat out misrepresentations, and every two minutes you are incorrect. You are a waste of time.
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All else. I finally pulled out both the Pine Valley books and looked at the images in question side by side and at a number of the other images as well. A few generally comments.
Anyone who thinks that prior to clearing this was a scattering of small bushes (as you guys seem to implying with the constant sarcasm and comments about scrubs and dwarfs) and that the land would have been easily discernible from a moving train, then either you have not seen the photos in the books, or you are delusional, or like Mike you are purposefully misrepresenting the facts.
Bryan, there is a photo in both books showing the steam winch used to pull the stumps, along with a number of stumps. The "scrub" or "dwarf" stumps look to be in the range of eight inches to a foot in diameter, larger than a man's thigh but narrower than his waste. While they may not have been redwoods, were not five foot saplings either. Of course Mike knows this because he has seen at least one of the books. Yet he is too slimy to tell you this, and instead plays along with notion that these were tiny trees.
As for the two photos in question:
- Neither is great, but the photo in the Brown book is much better. Someone with a working scanner (not me) should scan it.
- Both photos are cropped. The photo in brown shows less sky, less immediate foreground (what appear to felled trees) and a bit more to the left of the photo.
- There may be a few man made structures visible in the Brown photo, but I cannot tell for sure.
As for what Mike is absolutely certain must be the RR tracks, it doesn't look like it to me at all. To me it looks like more bare area that has recently been cleared. The perspective and the exposure of the rough copy in the Shelly book make it look like a line but I don't think it is one.
Here is a section of the 1931 Aerial from the Dallin Collection showing the area in question. If nothing else it ought to give you guys an idea of this density of the surrounding woods, and everyone but Mike ought to be able to extrapolate back what the site might have looked like before it was cleared. They didn't call it Pine Valley for nothing.
And another aerial from the next year, showing a smaller area from the opposite perspective:
