Marijuana mountain

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S.F. WATERSHED -- "Welcome to camp marijuana," announced Sgt. Leo Capovilla, smiling beneath a pair of dark glasses.

Capovilla, wearing camouflage and a sheriff's badge, was standing in what looked like a homeless encampment hidden deep in the woods of the San Francisco State Fish and Game Refuge, down a long dirt lane and beyond a thick grove of poison oak.

A blue tent was erected near a shaded kitchen area. Rotting food festered in bags. A box of .22-caliber bullets was sitting among the trash, and clothes littered the area.

Until a few weeks ago, whoever lived here tended a business that only barely got off the ground, literally. About one hundred young marijuana plants were wilting in a fenced-off garden area nearby.

It was lucky the cultivators got out when they did. On Thursday, the San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force showed up for the harvest.

Teams of narcotics agents descended on several marijuana groves in the rural San Mateo County foothills -- confiscating 2,500 plants growing at two sites.

All afternoon, agents with machetes hacked away at the odorous green groves. A police helicopter hoisted bundle after bundle to a team that loaded them into the back a white dump truck.

On the street, each plant could fetch around $4,000, placing the total value of the bust at around $10 million.

It is the Narcotics Task Force's annual end-of-summer outdoor marijuana roundup. Throughout the late summer months, agents conduct flights over much of the county's unincorporated land, looking for the illicit gardens hidden under the canopies of trees. Each September, they bust about half a dozen sites.

The largest, according to Narcotics Task Force commander Trisha Sanchez, was in 2001, when agents removed 36,000 plants from the watershed lands. But every seizure is important, she said.

"Some of this could potentially wind up in the hands of juveniles," Sanchez said. "We take it very seriously."

The growths are not just the product of some casual hippie seed scattering. There are often elaborate irrigation systems siphoning water from nearby creeks and mesh fences set up to keep deer from grazing the crops.

Agents often find a campsite, providing shelter for someone hired to water and guard the plants, Capovilla said. Sometimes, these caretakers are left with so little knowledge of where they are that they are forced to stick around. Supplies are secreted in.

Anyone with knowledge about marijuana growing can share information anonymously with the task force by calling 573-3991.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/article/in...304n_marijuana