Pioneer Forest

"Thanks for providing such a great forest. I have hiked the Ozark Trail through your forest and I can't tell you how happy I am that Pioneer Forest exists, and that you allow us to use it for low impact recreation. Our family took the 2-mile interpretive drive this summer, and we really enjoyed it. We canoed the Current River starting above Bee Bluff on down to Two Rivers, so we were along your Roger Pryor Pioneer wilderness for a ways, it was awesome. There was no one around and the area felt really wild. We always love looking at the old growth pine along Highway 19. Thanks so much for all of this. I hope it gets bigger, and goes on forever." ...Website Visitor

Pioneer Forest is located in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks. Forests here are dominated by oak, hickory and pine. Here, our conservative uneven-aged forest management method, known as single-tree selection harvesting, has been used for more than half a century. Our decades long use and research of this successful method strongly indicate it as a truly sustainable forest management practice. Leo Drey began acquisition of the lands that are now Pioneer Forest in March 1951. When National Distillers, a private company with lands located in the Ozarks, decided to liquidate its holdings in 1954, it sold approximately 90,000 acres of land to Leo Drey, who continued to purchase other forestland in the Ozarks for Pioneer Forest. For more than half a century, Pioneer Forest has restored more than 153,000 acres of Ozark woodlands across six Missouri counties through conservative, natural forest management.

Above (left to right): Ed Woods, Leo Drey, and Charlie Kirk

From the beginning, Drey challenged forest owners and managers to think in long-range terms about forests, their management, and the many public benefits forests provide. He recognized that these forested landscapes could be productive while they were managed using a more conservative harvesting technique. Drey's goal was to establish a demonstration method of harvesting trees while retaining the structure and character of the forest across the landscape. The long-range objective for Pioneer Forest is to develop and manage native tree species of large diameter and high quality for wood products while also providing a host of recreational and ecosystem benefits.