After a second read, here is what I came up with.
By the way, since your ocean is on the left, looking SOUTH to NORTH, their entire ordeal from parking to getting out, occured in the small upper portion of your area #1, exiting in the Stout Grove - your yellow spot. My diagram reverses compass direction view.
So you have a better idea of what you are looking at, the diagram below is looking from NORTH to SOUTH. Crescent City would be to the right, and the Campground is on the left. The lower fine yellow line is the main highway coming through the forest crudely east to west. The top fine yellow line is Howland Hill Rd. The parked along the lower yellow line, and hiked up the hill, likely going up that "Y" gulley you can see, taking the right or WEST fork. If that's the right Y, that means they probably angled a bit left or SOUTHEAST after, or they would be too far from Stout Grove. The area of forest framed-in here between the roads is about 3.0 miles north to south. And between Stout Grove and Crescent City about 7 miles east to west.
Glad you posted that photo - it does have a clue I overlooked in it. Walking in the redwoods, it's very dense and uncommon to see daylight in any one direction. Behind the tree and man, is an awful lot of daylight. That shows that the grassy clearing is truly a substantial one. Very uncommon in there. Might be a reason they are so big too.
The right dotted Green line is where I think Boy Scout Tree trail is, but maybe a bit more to the left. The left dotted Green line is Hiouchi Trail. I've been on both trails. Knowing that the grove is probably not within eye-shot of these trails, or the road, and knowing how long these men went up, eliminates a huge amount of area to look in. Virtually elimates the entire lower 2/3, because we know they traveled like 2.5 miles before finding it. And everything to the right is eliminated or they never would have got to Stout Grove in daylight. So whereas they explored the hardest to get through area and 100% of the area and found the grove, I would only need to look in about 10% of the area. And area about 1 mile x 1.5 miles. Very small region. And I can elimate the 7 hour brutal access and just come in from Howland Hill Rd., where I'm sure they enter now.
