A logging plan for the fabled forest grove of the Bohemian Club was rejected Thursday by a Sonoma County judge.

The San Francisco-based male-only club, originally founded by newspapermen in the 1870s, boasts membership of every Republican president since Herbert Hoover, and its annual summer gatherings are reportedly attended by the country’s top power brokers.

A 100-year logging plan submitted in late 2009 to harvest 1 million board-feet per year from the grove of Redwood and Douglas Fir trees was approved by state agencies, but the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit that has stopped any action for now at the tract 75 miles north of San Francisco near Monte Rio.

The logging proposal, known as a nonindustrial timber management plan, would have allowed the Bohemian Club to remove trees over a century to prevent potential fire danger, without seeking agency approval for individual harvests on the 2,700-acre tract.

The problem, argued Sierra Club attorney Paul Carroll, was that the Bohemian Club plan utilized boilerplate harvest alternatives which included cutting on an alternative site, which the Bohemian Club does not own, and turning the forest into a residential housing development.

“They hadn’t meaningfully considered alternatives,” Carroll said, adding that the Sierra Club would seek a lighter harvest as a legitimate alternative.

Carroll contends the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which was listed as a co-defendant in the suit, should stop accepting boilerplate alternative harvest plans.

dschreiber@sfexaminer.com