Volunteers to visit Santa Cruz state parks to clean up old pot grows

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FruityBud

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For each marijuana seedling planted in a state park, the grower lays 12 to 18 inches of irrigation line, which means a 5,000-plant garden uses approximately a mile of drip line.

That weighs 800 pounds, according to Shane Krogen, director of the High Sierra Trail Crew, and he would know.

In the past three years, Krogen's group has created a niche cleaning up the equipment, trash and poisons left behind when law enforcement officers raid large-scale marijuana plantations on public lands.

In November, Krogen and the High Sierra volunteers will restore nine sites at Castle Rock and Big Basin state parks in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It's work that likely would never be done if the Fresno-based trail crew didn't take up residence in the Castle Rock State Park trail camp for five days this fall.

"It's not about marijuana," Krogen says. "It's about reclamation and restoration and getting these things out of the area."

Sheriff's deputies and State Parks rangers who eradicated pot grows don't dispute the importance of cleaning up the marijuana plantations found on public lands. But they say law enforcement agencies simply don't have the resources to do the work.

"We try, but on the big grows it's too big of a project," says Sgt. Steve Carney, who heads the Sheriff's Office three-deputy Narcotics Enforcement Team. "We just don't have the personnel and the time. We can hardly keep up with the marijuana cases during the season."

At Castle Rock State Park, where seven former 2,000- to 4,000-plant grows are on the list of reclamation sites, Ranger Miles Standish says the areas would never be cleaned up if it weren't for the High Sierra volunteers.

"There's just three of us: me, myself and I and we have to run a park," Standish says. "We have over 5,200 acres and every day hundreds and hundreds of people come here."

Harming forests

The gardens are typically terraced into the hillsides, obscured slightly by pruned tress. Black tubing brings water from dammed creeks to the pot plants, which can grow up to 5 feet. Pesticides, bags of fertilizer and sometimes even barbed wire is found within the grows.

"You consider the fact they're using those pesticides and fertilizer with water ... when the rains come later that's all going to wash down into the streams, and when they leave, they don't take that stuff out with them," Standish explains. "If they have successful growing season, they take out the buds but everything else is just left."

Near the garden there is usually a campsite with a propane camping stove, extra canisters of fuel, clothing and bedding, tarps, food and hand tools.

"It always amazes me when I find things like bed springs and mattresses. Why would anyone haul that in?" Standish asks. "They'd probably just stay out there until the place burned over and even then the stuff would probably remain, some of it anyway."

The High Sierra Trail Crew has visited Santa Cruz County twice in the past. Volunteers cleaned up a garden in Big Basin in 2005 and went after three sites in Castle Rock the following year. In Castle Rock, they removed hundreds of pounds of garbage by piling it in giant nets that were roped to helicopters and hauled out.

However, the trail crew does more than filling trash bags. Krogen believes removing the growing equipment -- like the miles of drip line and releasing dammed streams -- may keep the illegal farmers from replanting the same sites.

"It's a subtle form of prevention," Krogen says.

Carney agrees. He likens it to taking the grow lights out of an indoor marijuana garden "so when they come back tomorrow they can't just turn it back on."

"It's beneficial to us to have it cleaned up," Carney says. "Hopefully that's a deterrent."

The trail crew volunteers have also gotten better at what they do, according to Krogen. Since they first visited Santa Cruz County three years ago, the crew has grown to a four-division organization with one section devoted to marijuana garden cleanups. They've completed more than 60 such projects and the efforts will amount to more than half of the High Sierra Trail Crew's work this year.

"We're kind of the lead people in this now," says Krogen, whose own job has grown from a volunteer coordinator to full-time director. "We've really perfected what we do."

A changing focus

Krogen believes his group's role is not only to clean up the land after a marijuana grow is removed, but to educate people about the long-term effects of clandestine pot gardens, which could, in turn, secure funding to restore the land where the pot was planted. He predicts there will be a wholesale change in the public perception of marijuana eradication and land rehabilitation efforts. That, however, is still three to five years away, he thinks.

"We're way ahead of this wave," he says.

In recent years, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting -- a state Department of Justice program better known as CAMP -- has shifted its public focus from drug wars to the environmental degradation caused by the hundreds of illegal marijuana gardens planted on state lands.

"You've got two factions: the old guard, law enforcement who keep beating a dead horse that marijuana is illegal," Krogen says. "Then you've got a new camp who say it's not about marijuana, it's about the damage being done to our public lands and that's the one, the white horse, that people need to get onto."

The increase of marijuana gardens found on public lands, such as state parks, may do the most to change to people's minds about how marijuana grows should be handled simply because the areas affected are close to their hearts.

In addition to leaving trash behind, the growers dam creeks, poach animals, use banned chemicals, terrace slopes and thin the natural vegetation.

"They leave hazardous materials and garbage," Standish, the Castle Rock ranger, says. "It just goes on and on."

Standish says he's seen a spike in pot grows found in the park since 2005.

"I've been here for 28 years and in the last three years here we've averaged three major grows a year that we've eradicated," Standish says. "Believe it or not, most of our discoveries are made by people who stumble upon them and tell us about them."

CAMP agents now talk about the importance of removing the pot plants because of the dangers the grows pose to people visiting parks to hike, fish, camp or hunt. Though arrests at the pot plantations are rare, law enforcement officers usually find guns and knives in the gardens. Since 2005, two armed growers in Santa Clara County have been shot and killed by sheriff's deputies.

Still, it's photos of helicopters hauling bushels of pot plants out of the forest and the estimated street value of the drugs -- many times more than $1 million -- that make the news, not the long-term effects of pot plantations.

"It's not sexy, but at some point in time it's going to change and it'll be the picture of a mutilated tree or dead animal that ate fertilizer or rat poison," Krogen says. "It's not about the growing. It's about the damage being done to the environment."

But so far, the financial support for the trail crew's work is not there. Krogen is still trying to drum up the funding to cover the High Sierra volunteers' food and travel costs to come to the county this fall, and it's hard to come by a donated helicopter, which can run $10,000 a day to rent.

"If we found the right funding and the right things fell into place, we would be doing this 50 weeks a year," he says. "There's 10 years worth of work."

Krogen sees Santa Cruz and the San Francisco Bay Area as the prime area to start turning the tide. He hopes to train a marijuana garden reclamation crew that eventually will handle cleaning up pot gardens in the region so his volunteers can focus on projects in the Sierra Nevada.

When the High Sierra Trial Crew visited Castle Rock two years ago, local volunteers came to help. The cleanup effort in Castle Rock and Big Basin state parks set for November will gauge interest in creating a permanent program here.

"I think it's a great opportunity to test something," Krogen says.

hxxp://tinyurl.com/5cqgmg
 
I think this would be better if we could get some smokers to go do this kinda work. It would send a message that smokers are different than the big dealers.
 
Is there a way to volunteer?

Big Basin is like a 20 minute drive from where I live..

...and I grew up in Santa Cruz.

Glad to see it mentioned. I miss it.
 
"You've got two factions: the old guard, law enforcement who keep beating a dead horse that marijuana is illegal," Krogen says. "Then you've got a new camp who say it's not about marijuana, it's about the damage being done to our public lands and that's the one, the white horse, that people need to get onto."


at last, a man with the common sense to realize that the enviromental damage of huge plots like this far outweigh the fact that mj is illegal.

of course he's not a l.e.o. what he says has too much integrity, and makes too much sense. legalize the plant and dealers go away, or find somthing else to deal.
 
SEE!!! SEE!!!! THAT WHAT I MEAN, PLEASE GO AHEAD AND GROW SEE THAT? SEE!!! THINK!! AND Seee!!! NOBODY AINT GONNA CLEAN IT UP LOL TOO MUCH TIME? ALRIGHT THINK OF TOO MUCH REALLY TOOOO MUCH PLANTS AROUND USA THEN ITS TOO MUCH FOR A LEO TO CLEAN IT ALL!
 

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