The Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern California covers over two million acres, stretching roughly from the former lumber town of Redding north to near the Oregon border, and from close to the Pacific Ocean east toward Nevada. Like most of the public land in this part of the country, Shasta is beloved of campers and hunters, a seemingly endless expanse of pine, fir, and oak trees, glistening lakes, and snowy mountaintops. It is the kind of place where a visitor resolves to write a check to the Sierra Club immediately upon returning home. It is also a new front in something else seemingly endless—the drug wars. Which is why I found myself, last August, knee-deep in Shasta's undergrowth, bushwhacking my way up a hillside with a group of Forest Service agents. Clad in dark camouflage and Kevlar vests, they carried M-16 rifles and hip-holstered pistols.
They were not being overzealous. In 2006, authorities here seized over $700 million worth of illicit marijuana from gardens—the euphemistic name generally given to pot farms—planted in Shasta, most of it by trained, and heavily armed, Mexican growers. As an occasional hiker myself, it was not hard for me to imagine being out on a trail (we were not far from one now, and only about a mile from the nearest road), my gravest concern a twisted ankle or the odd grizzly, only to stumble upon a garden and find myself facing a gun barrel. Things could go bad fast. They have before. In 2000, a grower shot a hiker and his young son. The year before, growers kidnapped a Bureau of Land Management botanist. In 2005, Forest Service agent Matt Knudson, walking a few yards ahead of me in Shasta, was on a raid near Los Angeles when a grower took two blasts at an agent. "Come harvest season they start bringing in more guns," Knudson explained. He regularly recovers shotguns, AK-47s, even MAC-10s and Uzis.
Late summer—harvest season was beginning. After an hour of hiking, the air grew heavy with a familiar scent, and just as my mind was transported back to my college dorm room, we arrived at our quarry: Cannabis plants, many thousands of them sprouting five and six feet tall from the forest floor, came into focus, their thin, serrated leaves and hirsute emerald buds everywhere. This was no Grateful Dead concert parking-lot piddle, mind you; these specimens were the size of tropical fruit.
The growers had fled in a hurry the night before, it seemed, leaving their camp looking like a scene from Pompeii. Spread on a crate between two cheap tents was a freshly dealt hand of cards. Sleeping bags, worn and stained, lay in the tents near an outdoor kitchen outfitted with a propane-burning skillet. Sweatshirts, chain-store jeans, garbage bags, ramen-noodle wrappers, emptied cans of jalapeņo peppers and El Pato brand tomato sauce, detergent bottles, and countless supermarket plastic bags littered the ground. Black PVC tubing fed a reservoir dug out of an embankment—a water system for drinking, bathing, and irrigation. The growers had bolted in such haste, they'd even left their shoes.
But there were no guns to be found: A bunch of felons, working under some very nasty auspices indeed, were now running around this bucolic paradise barefoot, cranky, and possibly in possession of some large automatic weapons.
Until recently, marijuana cultivation in the United States was mostly the province of small-time ex-hippies and the occasional rancher. In the last two decades, however, Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have taken over the business. Before 9/11, these cartels produced much of their marijuana in Mexico and ran it over the border. But since then law enforcement has squeezed many smuggling routes, and the gangs have increasingly taken to growing it here.
