News - Local - North Coast

Wednesday, Jul. 30, 2008

Pot season spurs worry for farmers, ranchers on the North Coast

Growers illegally use owners’ land and water for marijuana operations

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Wooded ridges and canyons sweeping to the sea offer spectacular vistas for visitors to the county’s scenic North Coast, along with grazing and growing land for ranchers and farmers.

But the rural backdrop also offers cover for a three-to four-month marijuana growing season.

And ranch owners aren’t happy. Besides using rancher’s land and water for illegal purposes, marijuana growers also pose a threat to landowners and wayward hikers.

Earlier this month, law enforcement officers had to use helicopters to reach a 7,000-plant marijuana patch with an estimated value of $35 million that was on an isolated ridge on Hearst Ranch, five miles east of San Simeon State Beach. Those tending the 5-to 6-foot-tall plants had disappeared into the wilderness, and no arrests were made. The plants were destroyed.

It’s not the first big marijuana grove discovered on the North Coast. In 1987, state narcotics officers raided patches on Hearst Ranch, pulling more than 6,000 plants with an estimated value of up to $34 million after adjusting for inflation. At that time, the haul was considered the largest ever made in the county.

“We do this every year,” said Steve Hearst, who heads up the Hearst Corp. division that manages the 82,000-acre ranch. “Everybody out there in the back country is looking for these farms. It’s fine to go in and destroy the product, but it would be nice if there were some arrests, some other penalty for the growers beyond having to go find some place else to plant.”

The groves, Hearst added, are in areas where “accessibility is difficult, only by foot. There’s no reason for us to ride in there, because there aren’t any cattle up there.”

“It’s always somewhere,” ranch manager Cliff Garrison said. “We deal with it quite often. Law enforcement spots it, comes in and gets it out ... (The growers are) in places where nobody ever goes, in the brush. It’s not something that’s real visible to us.”

Law enforcement sends planes looking for marijuana groves, sometimes spotted because the green patches stand out in a brown landscape. Patches also are sometimes reported by firefighting pilots.

Hearst estimated that pilots have located about a half dozen plots on the ranch since 1998, most “located in remote areas … on the north end, to the east,” near Nacimiento Lake.

Occasionally, ranchers stumble upon “grows” while doing agricultural chores.

Rancher Walter Fitzhugh found a large marijuana patch in 2005 while grading a road on his family’s ranch off Highway 46, near the crest of the Santa Lucia Range. In the late 1970s, rancher Ed Walter found a 10-acre marijuana field near the eastern edge of his Santa Rosa Creek Road ranch while tracking an errant cow.

Marijuana needs lots of sunlight and, usually, sophisticated irrigation systems. Growers must hijack precious water from a spring, cattle trough or even a remote cabin. Sometimes they even haul water in on their backs.

To avoid detection, groves on the North Coast are usually in remarkably inaccessible, rarely traversed areas of rugged ravines. Growers often carve clearings, leaving a circle of dense scrub oaks, willows, high chaparral or brush to camouflage the site.

Even though they walk in, carrying food, fertilizer and irrigation tubing, the growers’ camps can be elaborate.

According to rancher and local historian Dawn Dunlap, Walter, her late father, found “an entire lifestyle” near the marijuana field he discovered.

“(Growers) had set up — a bedroom area, a kitchen area, even a hot tub,” she said, “like a whole outdoor Swiss Family Robinson.”

“One of the big problems,” Fitzhugh said, “is you run into these patches, and you don’t know if these people are armed.”

Growers can set up booby traps to frighten away those who come too close. One rancher described a device using a shotgun shell and a triggering device that could be set off by a wayward hiker.

Growers carving out brush and laying drip lines destroy habitat and alter water flow, causing ranchland to erode. And they leave debris ranchers have to clean up after law enforcers have taken away the marijuana.

“(Growers) had about 4,000 feet of pipeline they’d put in to irrigate it,” Fitzhugh said of a plot on his land. “At least I got a little bit of pipe out of it. But we also hauled out two big truckloads of ... tents, sleeping bags, propane bottles.”

For every pot plantation ripped out, others go undiscovered and reach harvest.

“What you see now is more of the larger, organized marijuana grows,” sheriff’s Cmdr. Ben Hall said. “If the guy who coordinates it all loses a garden or two, so what? At $3,000 a pound, he’s still making money.”