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With paper sack lunches, hard hats and gloves, a dozen fleece- and Gortex-clad volunteers gather around their crew leaders for instructions.
Drinking Gatorade and taking breaks will be important, says Shane Krogen, director of High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew.
The volunteers, mostly Southern California residents camping in the Santa Cruz Mountains this weekend, are spending three days cleaning up what marijuana farmers left behind in Castle Rock State Park off Highway 35: namely irrigation systems, campsites and pesticides.
This year, sheriff's deputies found a record number of marijuana plants growing on public and private lands in Santa Cruz County — more than 43,000 pot plants in 28 plantations, including eight on public land. And with that comes a large amount of environmental damage in the form of erosion, introduction of non-native species, animals poisoned by chemicals, clear-cut swaths of land and pesticides leeched into groundwater.
"The more we get out there, the more time we spend looking around, the more we find them," said sheriff's Sgt. Steve Carney, who heads the office's marijuana enforcement team.
Carney said part of the increase in marijuana garden busts is the result of improved efforts by the Sheriff's Office to find pot plantations.
The wet winter and spring increased seasonal water sources, making the Santa Cruz Mountains a lusher place to plant pot this year. Also, years with less enforcement by the Sheriff's Office — only 14,500 plants were found indoors and outdoors in 2005 and fewer than 10,000 were located in each of the two prior years — could have led growers to get more comfortable and plant more, Carney said.
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"It's a growing problem and it's increased every year, the number of gardens that have been planted on public lands," said State Parks ranger supervisor Mary Hazel, who oversees Castle Rock and Portola Redwoods state parks.
This is new territory for High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew, a group that does the majority of its work maintaining trails around Yosemite National Park. Two and a half years ago, High Sierra volunteers were asked to rehabilitate a marijuana garden site on park land near Fresno. They obliged and, including this weekend's event at Castle Rock, have tallied 19 pot plantation clean-up weekends since March 2004.
"It's pretty undramatic," said Krogen as he surveyed a terraced hillside for trash. "We're sanitary engineers."
The marijuana garden work is not the hardest work the volunteers do — 24 year-old crew member Evan Savage said cutting trees that had fallen across trails required more energy. However, the garden cleanup is a task few will perform. While numerous groups maintain hiking trails across the state, High Sierra is one of the only organizations that spends time rehabilitating the abandoned gardens.
"We wouldn't be able to do as much cleanup without them," Hazel said.
Sheriff's deputies and other law enforcement officials cut down almost all of the pot plants found in outdoor gardens this year, then buried the plants, hauled them out by hand or used a helicopter to lift marijuana bundles out. Some of the supplies — usually any weapons and as many bags of pesticides as the officers could carry — were also removed, but everything else was left in the forest and State Parks doesn't have resources to dedicate to the cleanup.
"There isn't any funding really allocated for this kind of work," said Chris Spohrer, State Parks resource ecologist for the Santa Cruz district. "We're scrambling."
That's why High Sierra volunteers trekked from Fresno to spend three days picking up trash and smoothing terraced slopes in Castle Rock last week.
The gardens the crew worked in Thursday were "medium-sized" when sheriff's deputies and State Parks rangers hiked down to them early in the summer, Carney said. One farmer, armed with a knife, ran off into the woods and was never caught, he said. About 4,000 plants — less than one-tenth of the year's haul — were eradicated in that bust, according to Sheriff's Office figures.
"It's rank, pretty rank," said Norm Allington, 62, who runs a swim gear shop and has been helping out since the High Sierra volunteers got their start a dozen years ago.
But it's funny, too. The crew collected two sets of nail clippers and a bottle of cologne, which incited jokes that the farmers were conscience of their hygiene. A conversation about the farmers' cuisine kicked up when the volunteers found Top Ramen wrappers. The cheap noodles, tortillas and canned foods are standard at most of the marijuana garden camps the crew has picked up, Loewen said.
Eleven of the outdoor marijuana gardens belonged to Mexican drug cartels, Carney said. Those farmers typically are armed; when deputies raided the gardens in Castle Rock where High Sierra volunteers worked Thursday, a man tending to the crops brandished a knife at them before escaping into the trees.
Carney said the other marijuana gardens busted by deputies this year were split among three groups:
* People who buy 3 to 5 acres of land to grow about 300 plants to sell commercially but try to cover up their illegal activity by posing as medicinal marijuana patients.
* Medicinal growers who clear public or private land to grow mass quantities of marijuana, some to sell.
* Locals coming onto someone else's land to grow about 25 plants. The growers don't claim a medical necessity and are usually growing for commercial sale.
Of the four, the Mexican cartel growers plant the largest plantations; they grow between 5,000 and 15,000 plants in multiple gardens connected by trails and irrigation lines, Carney said, and the larger gardens leave behind a bigger mess.
The six High Sierra volunteers on Krogen's crew Thursday stuffed rusted rat traps, muddy sheets of black plastic and food wrappers in white "Adopt A Highway" trash bags, then seal the bags with strips of duct tape. Lengths of irrigation tubing are bailed; blankets and tarps get rolled together and taped up.
Eventually, all of the bundles and bags are mounded in the "LZ" Krogen and marked with yellow flags. Later, the mound will be piled onto a large net and hoisted from the forest by a helicopter. It's 1,000 to 1,200 pounds of trash, enough to fill at least three nets for the helicopter, Krogen said.
"This is typical, very typical," he said.
It's a good start, but doesn't address the larger environmental problems the pot plantations cause, like pesticides leeching into groundwater. The worst damage, Spohrer said, is caused when marijuana farmers dam up and reroute seasonal creeks.
"The High Sierra group, they're taking out the trash, the pesticides left behind, the makeshift kitchens — all of that," Hazel said. "But if you think about that, trees have been cut and the land has been terraced. That's going to take years for the land to repair itself.
"That is probably one of the worst aspects of these illegal gardens because there's just so much environmental damage."
The only gardens in the county High Sierra volunteers will rehabilitate this year are in Castle Rock State Park. Other pot plantations and campsites, including some in the Soquel Demonstration Forest, will be left to the wilds.
Visit SantaCruzPHOTOGALLERY.com to view photos related to this story.
Contact Jennifer Squires at jsquires@santacruzsentinel.com.
Confiscated marijuana plants
This year, sheriff's deputies found more marijuana growing in the Santa Cruz Mountains than any other year on record. The following counts include plants found indoors and outdoors:
1994: 5,785........1995: 7,754........1996: 17,746...........1997: 15,816
1998: not available..........1999: 9,240................2000: not available
2001: 31,437..........2002: not available..........2003: 8,305
2004: 2,132..............2005: 14,500.......2006: 45,140 (43,274 outdoor plants)
Source: Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office
Newshawk: 420AM&PM - 420 Magazine
Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA)
Pubdate: October 22, 2006
Author: Jennifer Squires
Copyright: Copyright © 1999-2006 Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Contact: https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/news/edit/form.htm
Website: Santa Cruz Sentinel - Online Edition
Drinking Gatorade and taking breaks will be important, says Shane Krogen, director of High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew.
The volunteers, mostly Southern California residents camping in the Santa Cruz Mountains this weekend, are spending three days cleaning up what marijuana farmers left behind in Castle Rock State Park off Highway 35: namely irrigation systems, campsites and pesticides.
This year, sheriff's deputies found a record number of marijuana plants growing on public and private lands in Santa Cruz County — more than 43,000 pot plants in 28 plantations, including eight on public land. And with that comes a large amount of environmental damage in the form of erosion, introduction of non-native species, animals poisoned by chemicals, clear-cut swaths of land and pesticides leeched into groundwater.
"The more we get out there, the more time we spend looking around, the more we find them," said sheriff's Sgt. Steve Carney, who heads the office's marijuana enforcement team.
Carney said part of the increase in marijuana garden busts is the result of improved efforts by the Sheriff's Office to find pot plantations.
The wet winter and spring increased seasonal water sources, making the Santa Cruz Mountains a lusher place to plant pot this year. Also, years with less enforcement by the Sheriff's Office — only 14,500 plants were found indoors and outdoors in 2005 and fewer than 10,000 were located in each of the two prior years — could have led growers to get more comfortable and plant more, Carney said.
Advertisement
"It's a growing problem and it's increased every year, the number of gardens that have been planted on public lands," said State Parks ranger supervisor Mary Hazel, who oversees Castle Rock and Portola Redwoods state parks.
This is new territory for High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew, a group that does the majority of its work maintaining trails around Yosemite National Park. Two and a half years ago, High Sierra volunteers were asked to rehabilitate a marijuana garden site on park land near Fresno. They obliged and, including this weekend's event at Castle Rock, have tallied 19 pot plantation clean-up weekends since March 2004.
"It's pretty undramatic," said Krogen as he surveyed a terraced hillside for trash. "We're sanitary engineers."
The marijuana garden work is not the hardest work the volunteers do — 24 year-old crew member Evan Savage said cutting trees that had fallen across trails required more energy. However, the garden cleanup is a task few will perform. While numerous groups maintain hiking trails across the state, High Sierra is one of the only organizations that spends time rehabilitating the abandoned gardens.
"We wouldn't be able to do as much cleanup without them," Hazel said.
Sheriff's deputies and other law enforcement officials cut down almost all of the pot plants found in outdoor gardens this year, then buried the plants, hauled them out by hand or used a helicopter to lift marijuana bundles out. Some of the supplies — usually any weapons and as many bags of pesticides as the officers could carry — were also removed, but everything else was left in the forest and State Parks doesn't have resources to dedicate to the cleanup.
"There isn't any funding really allocated for this kind of work," said Chris Spohrer, State Parks resource ecologist for the Santa Cruz district. "We're scrambling."
That's why High Sierra volunteers trekked from Fresno to spend three days picking up trash and smoothing terraced slopes in Castle Rock last week.
The gardens the crew worked in Thursday were "medium-sized" when sheriff's deputies and State Parks rangers hiked down to them early in the summer, Carney said. One farmer, armed with a knife, ran off into the woods and was never caught, he said. About 4,000 plants — less than one-tenth of the year's haul — were eradicated in that bust, according to Sheriff's Office figures.
"It's rank, pretty rank," said Norm Allington, 62, who runs a swim gear shop and has been helping out since the High Sierra volunteers got their start a dozen years ago.
But it's funny, too. The crew collected two sets of nail clippers and a bottle of cologne, which incited jokes that the farmers were conscience of their hygiene. A conversation about the farmers' cuisine kicked up when the volunteers found Top Ramen wrappers. The cheap noodles, tortillas and canned foods are standard at most of the marijuana garden camps the crew has picked up, Loewen said.
Eleven of the outdoor marijuana gardens belonged to Mexican drug cartels, Carney said. Those farmers typically are armed; when deputies raided the gardens in Castle Rock where High Sierra volunteers worked Thursday, a man tending to the crops brandished a knife at them before escaping into the trees.
Carney said the other marijuana gardens busted by deputies this year were split among three groups:
* People who buy 3 to 5 acres of land to grow about 300 plants to sell commercially but try to cover up their illegal activity by posing as medicinal marijuana patients.
* Medicinal growers who clear public or private land to grow mass quantities of marijuana, some to sell.
* Locals coming onto someone else's land to grow about 25 plants. The growers don't claim a medical necessity and are usually growing for commercial sale.
Of the four, the Mexican cartel growers plant the largest plantations; they grow between 5,000 and 15,000 plants in multiple gardens connected by trails and irrigation lines, Carney said, and the larger gardens leave behind a bigger mess.
The six High Sierra volunteers on Krogen's crew Thursday stuffed rusted rat traps, muddy sheets of black plastic and food wrappers in white "Adopt A Highway" trash bags, then seal the bags with strips of duct tape. Lengths of irrigation tubing are bailed; blankets and tarps get rolled together and taped up.
Eventually, all of the bundles and bags are mounded in the "LZ" Krogen and marked with yellow flags. Later, the mound will be piled onto a large net and hoisted from the forest by a helicopter. It's 1,000 to 1,200 pounds of trash, enough to fill at least three nets for the helicopter, Krogen said.
"This is typical, very typical," he said.
It's a good start, but doesn't address the larger environmental problems the pot plantations cause, like pesticides leeching into groundwater. The worst damage, Spohrer said, is caused when marijuana farmers dam up and reroute seasonal creeks.
"The High Sierra group, they're taking out the trash, the pesticides left behind, the makeshift kitchens — all of that," Hazel said. "But if you think about that, trees have been cut and the land has been terraced. That's going to take years for the land to repair itself.
"That is probably one of the worst aspects of these illegal gardens because there's just so much environmental damage."
The only gardens in the county High Sierra volunteers will rehabilitate this year are in Castle Rock State Park. Other pot plantations and campsites, including some in the Soquel Demonstration Forest, will be left to the wilds.
Visit SantaCruzPHOTOGALLERY.com to view photos related to this story.
Contact Jennifer Squires at jsquires@santacruzsentinel.com.
Confiscated marijuana plants
This year, sheriff's deputies found more marijuana growing in the Santa Cruz Mountains than any other year on record. The following counts include plants found indoors and outdoors:
1994: 5,785........1995: 7,754........1996: 17,746...........1997: 15,816
1998: not available..........1999: 9,240................2000: not available
2001: 31,437..........2002: not available..........2003: 8,305
2004: 2,132..............2005: 14,500.......2006: 45,140 (43,274 outdoor plants)
Source: Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office
Newshawk: 420AM&PM - 420 Magazine
Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA)
Pubdate: October 22, 2006
Author: Jennifer Squires
Copyright: Copyright © 1999-2006 Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Contact: https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/news/edit/form.htm
Website: Santa Cruz Sentinel - Online Edition
