E sat back and exhaled a plume of smoke into the middle of the room and cracked a smile. “Huntin’ on a Budget.”
He liked saying it.
And then his phone rang.
The big engine of the Chevy pickup growled as we drove up Highway 180, a windy two-lane that snakes through the Sierra Nevada foothills, up toward the top of the mountain. We couldn’t risk parking the truck by the side of the road—it would be spotted for sure—so the plan called for a tactical insertion.
The mountain rose up on our left, broken by fingers of rough canyons, scrubby pine, and the occasional droopy-looking motel. On the right side of the road was a beautiful vista, rolling foothills of chaparral, and, in the far distance, California’s Central Valley, millions of acres of orchards bearing olives, plums, pluots, and peaches stretching off into the horizon. It isn’t called “America’s Fruit Bowl” for nothing.
The view was magnificent because it wasn’t impeded by any forest or mountain or hillside. The right side of the road was a sheer cliff that dropped off hundreds of feet into the valley below.
Hank Williams III, son of Hank Williams, Jr., and grandson of the country legend, sang his smartass hellbilly country punk on the truck’s stereo—a song about drinking whiskey and smoking weed and fucking around with your best friend’s girlfriend—as we pulled into a turnout and waited for the cars behind us to pass.
My guide on this excursion is considered the top cannabis grower in what is arguably the best cannabis growing area in California. He’s friendly, intelligent, and complicated; a transcendental meditating libertarian, a perfectionist pot farmer, barbecue aficionado, and all-around family man named Crockett.
Crockett looked back at me, stroked his goatee, and cracked a grin. “Ready to do some bushwhackin’?”
I wasn’t sure, exactly, what “bushwhacking” meant, but I thought I had a general idea. I flashed a thumbs-up. “I’m good to go.”
The Guru, one of Crockett’s business partners and close friends, made a tight face. “Just watch out for the poison oak.”
The plan was for E to drop us off and then come back and pick us up in one hour exactly. We actually synchronized our watches.
E checked the rearview mirror, looking to see if any traffic was coming up the mountain behind us. “Looks clear.”
Crockett gave a nod and E hit the gas, gravel spitting out from the truck’s tires as we shot out onto the road. The sudden tire-squealing urgency signaled that we were now in commando mode, and everything needed to happen fast. For the first time I realized that they were actually serious about this covert “black op” stuff. Perhaps going to the Mexican cartel’s grow site wasn’t such a great idea after all.
E drove fast. The sheer drop on the right was dangerously close to my window, giving me flashes of the valley floor followed by a bowel-churning surge of adrenaline. I wanted to tell him to take it easy, but it wouldn’t have mattered. We were committed. It was go time and we were going.
The truck roared up the road about a quarter of a mile, into a long sweeping turn along the face of a sheer cliff. And then, without warning, E hit the brakes and the truck lurched to a stop in the middle of the highway. Crockett, the Guru, and I bailed out of the truck as fast as we could. E didn’t wait around to see if we made it. As soon as we were out, he took off in a cloud of swirling dust.
I looked up and saw Crockett leap off the edge of the cliff and disappear. The Guru followed. I hesitated. I’m not the kind of person who likes to jump off a cliff when I can’t see where I might land—I guess you could say I’m one of those “look before you leap” types—so I ran to the edge and took a quick peek. The drop was steep, maybe a good seven or eight feet down, but it wasn’t totally vertical. I could see a landing zone where Crockett and the Guru were waiting. I followed their example and cannonballed off the precipice and into a dense thicket of manzanita, scrub pine, and what turned out to be poison oak.
I met Crockett and the Guru on my first trip to Amsterdam. We were on the same flight, we were all headed to the Cannabis Cup, and we struck up a conversation. They claimed to be two “construction workers” on an adventure, but I didn’t believe that for a second.
I had ended up following Crockett through the kaleidoscopic mindfuck that greets passengers at Schipol, making our way down to passport control and baggage claim. Now I was following him as he dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl through the dense brush like some kind of boot camp puke dragging his belly under coils of barbed wire.
Crockett is big, maybe six one or two and the kind of guy who is a lot stronger than he looks. When he smiles he radiates a friendly, laid-back charm, but when he drops his sunglasses over his eyes and tightens his jaw, he can suddenly look like a charter member of Sonny Barger’s motorcycle club. He’s partial to cargo shorts and flip-flops, but on this scramble down a cliff face he opted for sensible hiking shoes.
Crockett keeps his goatee scruffy and his long black hair in a ponytail, banded along its length into a thick whip. He has the look of a bona fide mountain man, which shouldn’t be surprising: He grew up in the Sierras and spent his youth working for the park service. In fact, he’d considered a career as a ranger before he got caught up in the world of marijuana farming.
When he offered to take me to one of the Mexican cartel’s illegal grow sites he told me to “bring the stuff you’d take on a camping trip.” I’m not much of a camper. I don’t really see the point in sleeping outside when there’s a perfectly good hotel nearby. So when I head out into the world for some “nature,” my survival kit is usually just a swimming suit, a credit card, and a corkscrew. But even if I was the camping type, I don’t think I’d have the gear to go scampering down the face of an overgrown cliff or crawling on my belly through brambles and thickets of pungent brush. This was hard-core bushwhacking and, if you asked me, what we needed for this excursion was a machete. A sharp machete.
Crockett turned to me, as if suddenly remembering something important. “Oh, yeah. Be careful. It’s been a bad year for snakes.”
A really sharp machete and a gun.
I squatted in the brush, noticing that I had inadvertently crawled into a bank of poison oak, and heard the click of a lighter behind me. I looked back to see the Guru firing up a joint.
“You’re smoking?”
The Guru shrugged. “I smoke more than most people.”
He is also more allergic to poison oak than most people. Fortunately he has a lean and compact body that seemed to glide through the chaparral that Crockett and I crushed under foot. If anyone from the Mexican drug cartel was down below, they’d heard us. We sounded like a pair of rhinos crashing through the brush.
The grow site was supposed to be abandoned. It was busted a couple of years ago in a major operation—the DEA and local police had seized more than eight thousand plants—but you never know if the cartel has slipped back onto the site and started working it again. It’s happened in the past.
Crockett raised his hand in some kind of commando signal and we stopped. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard a rattlesnake or what. The brush was so thick I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. Crockett pointed down the hill to his right. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust and then I saw it, through a thick screen of brambles. About twenty feet below us was a large depression carved into the side of the cliff lined with black plastic.
We shimmed through the tangle of brush toward it. The scrub and trees poked and snapped at me from all sides, drawing blood like arboreal piranhas. My backpack, which carried my notebook, camera, a bottle of water, and a few energy bars, had mesh netting on the side that kept getting snagged on the branches. I started, stopped, started, stopped, and got frustrated and yanked on the thing, causing branches to snap back at the Guru’s face. He didn’t seem to notice. He was preoccupied with not touching any poison oak, adopting the pose of a soldier trying to surrender, sidling through the woods with his hands raised in the air.
I reached Crockett and the pool du
g into the hillside. It looked like a Jacuzzi Fred Flintstone might use, carved out of the rock to collect and store rainwater, and big enough for Fred, Wilma, and the Rubbles. A tangle of black irrigation hoses sprang out of it and crisscrossed the cliff. I wondered how this wasn’t spotted by a helicopter and then looked up and realized that the entire hillside was under a dense canopy of trees.
We pushed on through the brambles, stopping when we came across evidence of civilization. A ragged pair of jeans hung from a tree. I guess there was no time to grab your laundry when the feds swooped in. There was a pile of trash: empty El Pato brand cans that had once held chipotle chilies, old cans of tomatoes and frijoles refritos, tortilla wrappers, and an empty bottle of Herradura tequila. The Guru found an old bottle of Caladryl, a lotion used to soothe the itching from poison oak, and laughed.
“I know how it feels, amigo. I know exactly how it feels.”
Several bags of chemical fertilizer were piled up next to a large boulder and left to rot.
Further down we discovered more reservoirs and what must’ve been fifty miles of black hoses. In an area allegedly swarming with rattlesnakes, the tubing slithering on every square foot of the cliff made me slightly jumpier than I usually am when I crawl through snake-infested forests.
We entered a small clearing cut into the thicket. Crockett reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt. It looked different from the dust and rocks we’d been scrambling through. This looked like soil, like the kind of dirt you’d find in your vegetable garden.
He let it sift through his fingers.
“Here’s where they planted some.”
We walked further into the clearing and I sighed with relief. The ground here was only pitched at about forty-five degrees—unlike the near vertical slant of the rest of the cliff—and I was able to stand upright without gouging my head on overhanging manzanita branches. The Guru pointed to a spot on the tree trunks where branches had obviously been cut. He adopted a kind of wise-ass Colombo tone and said, “These marks appear to be man-made.”
Someone had come through with a pruner and strategically sawed off branches allowing just enough sunlight through the canopy for the plants to grow without exposing the operation to snooping helicopters. Imagine pruning a national forest.
Crockett drew a map in the dirt, showing how the cartel had cultivated three large tiers that spread out across the face of the cliff. It was ingenious really; the scale of the operation and the stealth of the execution was mind-boggling. The Mexican cartel had taken an overgrown cliff in a wild forest and turned it into a vast, secret marijuana farm that was invisible from the road and cleverly camouflaged from the air.
In fact, this site was discovered by accident. The sweeping turn off U.S. 180 is only a quarter mile from a little roadhouse motel called the Snowline Lodge. One evening a couple of locals were sitting out on the front porch drinking beer when they smelled the distinct aroma of Mexican cooking drifting in the twilight breeze. I should note that, sadly, there isn’t anything resembling a Mexican restaurant up on the mountain. Curious or, perhaps, hungry, the locals followed their noses down the road until they reached the edge of the cliff. They couldn’t see anything through the canopy of forest, but they knew for sure that some al pastor was being grilled somewhere down below.
Crockett and the Guru refer to this part of the Sequoia National Forest as “the Battlefield.” There are hundreds of acres of national parkland being used as covert grow sites for the Mexican cartel. For the cartel, it’s easy. They drop a couple of campesinos and supplies off in the middle of nowhere and come back in a few months and collect the harvest. The cost of production is low and the profits are huge, as much as $100 million a season.
For the park rangers and local law enforcement, the job of catching the cartel is nearly impossible. The crops are invisible from the air, because the cannabis is planted to blend in with the natural growth pattern of the forest. The only sure way of finding a site is to send foot patrols into the woods, and even then, the brush is so thick that without a team of experienced bushwhackers, a ranger on patrol could walk right past a large operation and not see it.
Even though he’s a licensed grower in California, providing connoisseur-quality weed to medical marijuana dispensaries, Crockett sees the cartel as a nuisance. It brings the scrutiny of federal law enforcement to the area. Although what Crockett does is legal in the Golden State, it remains a federal crime, putting him at risk. The cat-and-mouse game between the cartel and law enforcement causes disruptions, even occasional violence, and as someone who grew up in these mountains, Crockett has legitimate concerns about the environmental impact of this guerrilla farming.
“The Michoacáns rip up the hillsides. They leave trash. They cause accidental fires.” He pointed to a pile of fertilizer next to a rock and asked, “What do you think’s going to happen when those bags of fertilizer break open?”
“Michoacáns?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s really who they are, but when they arrested some guys a few years ago they were all from Michoacán, so that’s what we call them.”
He seemed equally annoyed by the quality of the marijuana they’re producing.
“The Michoacán shit’s not bad, but it’s not great. It’s nothing like what they could grow here if they used good seeds.”
I can’t tell if that’s his local pride coming through or just his professionalism. He really believes that if you’re going to go to all the trouble to grow here, you should grow something amazing.
A quick check of the synchronized watch and it’s time to head back for our rendezvous with the truck.
After scrambling up the cliff, where I got a face full of poison oak but, fortunately, didn’t encounter a rattlesnake, we hunkered down, out of sight, by the edge of the road.
The Guru relit his joint and took a couple more hits. He exhaled and announced that he needed lunch.
We heard a low rumble and Crockett stood.
“That’s her.”
The pickup skidded to a stop a few feet above our heads and we scrambled up, back into the truck and back on the road.
Crockett didn’t just come by his profession accidentally. He’s a third-generation pot grower.
“I’ve been around it since I was a little kid. My mom’s family and my dad’s family.”
“Your dad was a grower?”
Crockett shook his head. “My dad was a nine to five-er, worked in an office his whole life, but I had people on my mom’s side.”
He paused to light a cigarette. “I was always fascinated with it and it just kind of pulled me in.”
“How old were you?”
“I started just helping out, working for bud. I was probably sixteen or seventeen and it evolved into growing it myself and getting help from a lot of people that I knew who were already in the business for twenty, maybe thirty years.”
I was impressed. “That’s some old-school pot farming.”
Crockett nodded. “We figured that in my family, it started around the late fifties, early sixties. So we’ve been growing for almost fifty years. In this area.”
That, as I’ll find out, is an important point for him.
“Did you always plan to be a grower?”
“It worked out to where I would go get a job doing construction or something like that and it would get to the point where the job was interfering with my growing so I would have to weigh it out and be like, what’s going to make me more money? So then I started taking jobs that would allow me to grow. Like I worked up here in the national park as a cave guide for six or seven hours a day and I’d still have time in the middle of the day to tend my plants.”
“It seems like you love growing weed.”
Crockett took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled. “I do enjoy it. It’s a lot of work, a lot of stress. I enjoy it ’cause I’m passionate about creating new things. I enjoy everything about it except for the law factor.”
One of the provisions
of California’s medical marijuana law is that patients are allowed to grow six mature plants and twelve immature plants. But since most patients are either not farmers or don’t have the room, they sign an affidavit allowing a professional cannabis farmer to grow their plants for them. This way, farmers like Crockett and the Guru can grow their crops legally, at least legally in California.
We turned off the main road and proceeded to roll through some beautiful countryside, down one canyon into a valley, up another. I couldn’t fully appreciate the scenery as the constant rolling hills and switchbacks were making me a little queasy. Crockett pointed out places where the Mexican cartel were growing.
“They go in there, just off that creek.”
A couple of switchbacks later the truck slowed down again.
“They’re up there, somewhere. Maybe a couple miles in.”
The Sequoia National Forest has a limited number of roads, and is one of the largest wilderness areas in the entire United States. Most of it is accessible only by hiking or bushwhacking in. With that kind of privacy and the optimal weather the area affords, it’s no surprise that it’s a popular place for illegal grow ops.
We drove down into the bottom of a canyon, into a little outpost of civilization nestled among a stand of tall pines, and stopped for lunch at a restaurant called the Pinehurst Lodge.
From the outside the restaurant looked like a big dusty barn with a battered, rusted-out sign above the door. Inside it looked like a big dusty barn, only with a bar along the far wall and battered, rusted-out tables and chairs scattered around the main area. Would you be surprised if I told you there were deer heads decorating the wall?
There was a small general store attached to the lodge, a shop that seemed to be stocked with two of everything: two cylinders of Comet, two boxes of Tide, two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. It was the Noah’s Ark of country mercantile and yet with the mold-stained concrete floor, chipped concrete walls, and ancient shelving, it looked a lot like the basement of my grandmother’s house in Kansas City.
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