SCOTIA, Calif. (AP) - After more than 20 years of protests, the last two people living in the giant redwoods of Northern California were climbing down for good, convinced by the new owners of the forest they would spare the ancient trees from the saw.


Still, the tree sitters looked rather lost.

Having lived nearly 200 feet off the ground for 11 months, Nadia Berg - who calls herself 'Cedar' - seemed unsure of her footing on the lush forest floor of Humboldt County's Nanning Creek grove.

Cedar had turned into a tree dweller in 'Grandma,' a massive, double redwood conjoined at the base. She had grown accustomed to the whistles and whispers and ways of the woods. Now, it was time to come back to earth.

'Being here, for me, hasn't been a sacrifice,' said the 22-year-old Alberta native, still in her harness after rappelling down Grandma for the last time. 'I feel so honored that I could be here for the trees.'

Berg's neighbor, Billy Stoetzer, came down last week after living for nearly a year in a hammock-like shelter in 'Spooner,' a 300-foot-tall mammoth at least 1,500 years old. The 22-year-old from the Missouri Ozarks said he might delay his final departure for a week.

But the exact timing of the tree-sitters' departure hardly matters here. What does matter is that the great timber wars of the North Coast are over.

So quietly did the truce happen that almost no one involved can believe it. But the drawn out, sometimes violent, battles between Pacific Lumber Company, the largest private owner of old-growth redwoods, and environmental activists who flocked here to save the trees, are history. Pacific Lumber has new owners, a new name, Humboldt Redwood Co., and a new pledge to protect organisms that have been alive since B.C.

The end began a few weeks ago, when Michael Jani, the president and chief forester of the new Humboldt Redwood Company, hiked into the woods to meet the tree-sitters.

'I went out, looked at the trees, looked at the stand of trees that were around them and I explained to them that under our policy, we would not be cutting those trees,' said Jani, a 35-year veteran of logging companies.

Protecting old-growth trees was part of the plan that Humboldt Redwood, largely owned by Don and Doris Fisher of The Gap Inc., submitted to acquire Pacific Lumber in bankruptcy court. It also pledged to avoid cutting down trees in vast swaths, or clear-cutting, a practice that the timber giant had aggressively practiced under its previous owner, Maxxam Inc.

Since the owners of Humboldt Redwood had a track record - a 10-year history as owners of the Mendocino Redwood Company, one county away - environmentalists are cautiously optimistic that it will do as it promises, including sparing any redwood born prior to 1800 with a diameter of at least four feet.

So for weeks, the tree-sitters at the Nanning Creek and Fern Gully gr oves, where Pacific Lumber timber harvest plans had ancient trees on the chopping block, have been clearing out their encampments, removing their platforms and figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives.

'At this point, I'd like to focus on growing a garden,' said Rudi Bega, as in 'rutabaga.' The 28-year-old Idahoan, who also goes by the name Lodgepole, is an 11-year veteran of the timber wars. He co-founded We Save Trees, a descendant of Earth First!, to recruit, train and organize tree-sitters. A few years ago, he organized nearly 30 simultaneous tree-sits in five watersheds.

The last tree-sitters and their 'bottom liners,' or support crews, know that mere timing has cast them in the limelight. Since tree-sitting as a long-range protest began here in the late 1980s, scores of activists have descended here to take turns squatting in the redwoods, and hundreds more have helped them from the ground.

And tree-sits were just part of the fight that began almost as soon as Texas financier C harles Hurwitz, chairman of Maxxam, Inc. acquired Pacific Lumber with junk bonds in 1986.

Blockades of logging trucks, sit-ins at company offices, lawsuits by environmental groups and rallies attended by tens of thousands of protesters, were part of the mix.

Several battles made international headlines. They included the 1990 car bombing of Earth First! Leaders Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney; the pepper spray swabbing of protesters' eyes by Humboldt County sheriffs in 1997; the 1998 death of an activist, David 'Gypsy' Chain, killed by a tree cut by an enraged logger; the marathon two-year tree-sit by Julia 'Butterfly' Hill that ended in 1999; and the buying of 10,000 acres of the Headwaters Forest from Pacific Lumber by the state and federal governments in 1999.

The car bombing put the timber wars on the map. Cherney and Bari were driving in Oakland, recruiting volunteers for planned protests they dubbed 'Redwood Summer,' when a bomb exploded under the front seat of their car, shattering Bari's pelvis. Oakland police and the F.B.I. accused them of trying to transport the bomb for ecoterrorism.

Twelve years later, in 2002, five years after Bari died of cancer, the pair won $4.4 million in a federal civil suit; a jury agreed their civil rights had been violated and their names defamed by the local and federal authorities who arrested them.

Cherney, who lives in Garberville, says he netted about $500,000. He has spent much of his time since the settlement working on a movie about Redwood Summer.

'This has been a long term campaign with a tremendous amount of high water marks,' Cherney said of the timber wars. As to the end of the fight with Pacific Lumber, Cherney said, 'I would say that I have a healthy dose of skepticism. But it does feel like a great weight has been lifted from the shoulders of southern Humboldt County to have Maxxam gone.'

Long-time activists, like Karen Pickett, a founder of the Berkeley-based Bay Area Coalition to Save Headwaters, say they plan to remain vigilant.

'There was a banner used very early on that said, 'Maxxam out of Humboldt,' and it's finally happened,' she said. 'But we've lost a lot.'

Coho salmon runs have been depleted through logging, she said, and the marbled murrelet, an endangered seabird that nests in the tops of old-growth redwoods, 'is hanging on for dear life.'

The second generation of forest defenders, as the activists prefer to be called, are tired.

Stoetzer and Berg said they plan to stick around Humboldt County and continue their activism, though they did not know when or how. 'I guess,' Stoetzer said, scratching his matted hair, 'I'll get a job.'

Their main support on the ground, Amy Arcuri, left Humboldt State University eight years ago to devote herself full-time to sitting in trees or helping tree-sitters from the ground. She has trekked a mile and a half into the woods two or three time a week for nearly a year, bringing them supplies, emptying their waste buckets, providing tea and sympathy. But she is 30 years old now, with a 21-month-old daughter, River, and an organic farm to tend.

Now, she said, she has other work to do.

'This place is special because of all the endangered species,' she said, sitting on her haunches under 'Spooner.' She named it that, she said, 'Because I wanted to spoon with the tree.'

A knot at the base of the tree next to her was tagged, as are all other ancient redwoods in the grove, with pink tape that read: 'Do Not Cut.'