NATIONAL PARKS AN ESCAPE -- FOR DRUG SMUGGLERS

ORGAN PIPE CACTUS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz. -- Rust-red mountains and
green saguaro cactuses highlight a gorgeous panorama at this remote
national park, a pristine enclave of 330,000 acres in the Sonoran
Desert. Quail rustle in the brush, and piglike javelinas munch on
roots and leaves.

But park ranger Karl Pearson ignores the scenery, peering instead at
the dirt and pebbles on the dry ground. Reading clues invisible to an
untrained eye, he sees trouble.

''This is what I was afraid of,'' he says, pointing to some faint,
dun-colored circles in the soil: horses' hoofprints. ''You can see
tracks right here in the road, real fresh. I'll bet they came back
this morning.''

The riders, Pearson believes, were not on an innocent jaunt. More
likely, he says, they were drug traffickers returning to Mexico after
smuggling hundreds of pounds of marijuana north through the park into
the USA.

As federal authorities tighten security at some sectors of the border,
drug smugglers are switching to wilder, less-guarded sections -- and
that often means national parks. Many park officials say the
crackdowns at the border sectors near El Paso and McAllen, Texas;
Nogales, Ariz.; and San Diego have contributed to a recent rise in the
flow of drugs through the parks, though they decline to release
statistics. ''We shift our efforts, they shift theirs, to the path of
least resistance,'' says Joel Wright, an El Paso-based special agent
for the National Park Service.

As a result, authorities in the border parks are seizing thousands of
pounds of drugs a year and arresting dozens of people. Drug smugglers
have threatened rangers, trampled delicate plants and burned historic
structures.

Smugglers try to sneak through a half-dozen national parks,
including:

* Biscayne National Park, near Homestead, Fla. Consisting of about 300
square miles of ocean sprinkled with a handful of islands, this park
makes a spacious entryway for smugglers bringing drugs by boat from
Mexico or the Caribbean.

In their hurry to get to shore undetected, smugglers run their boats
aground in shallow waters, killing fragile sea grass. In August,
suspected drug traffickers being pursued by U.S. agents jumped
overboard, leaving their vessel making tight circles at 30 mph in a
section of the park covered with shallow reefs. Agents left the boat
alone until engine failure slowed it. Four men were arrested.

Smugglers usually try to slip through the park's waters at night,
without lights, at the same time that commercial and recreational
fishermen are chasing stone crabs and lobsters. ''It's certainly
exciting if a 30-foot go-fast (boat) zings by you at 30 mph,'' says
law-enforcement specialist Kim Korthuis, who says he's had that
experience many times. He worries that it could be much worse than
exciting someday for a luckless boater.

* Padre Island National Seashore, near Corpus Christi, Texas. This
park stretches along the Gulf Coast for 75 miles, making an inviting
landing place for loads of drugs from northeastern Mexico. Smugglers
ferry drugs in small, speedy ''sharkboats'' or by land from Mexico to
the park's beaches, where trucks pick up the shipments.

Sometimes a bale of drugs falls off a boat, or traffickers abandon
their load when the authorities close in. Cocaine often washes up
onshore, as do marijuana bundles, chief ranger Gus Martinez says.

On an afternoon in October, alerted that traffickers might be in the
area, Martinez began monitoring the main park road. The smugglers
didn't notice the patrol car by the side of the highway. ''They were
in a hurry, they broke a couple of (traffic) laws, and I pulled them
over,'' Martinez says.

Sitting in the bed of the smugglers' pickup were several duffel bags,
which proved to be loaded with drugs. ''It was right there,'' Martinez
says with amusement. The five men were arrested.

Martinez thinks the park's drug traffic poses little risk to
law-abiding beachgoers. But he resents the time and money spent in
chasing down traffickers. Those resources could be better spent on
filling gaps in the park's knowledge of its plants and animals, he
says. ''We don't know what we've got because we're busy chasing drug
dealers,'' Martinez complains.

* North Cascades National Park, near Sedro-Woolley, Wash. In southern
British Columbia, physically fit smugglers load canoes or kayaks full
of potent Canadian marijuana. Then they paddle down the park's Ross
Lake, which stretches from the U.S.-Canadian border to Washington's
Highway 20.

The only arrest so far came a few years ago after a smuggler failed to
meet his contact on Highway 20, chief ranger Pete Cowan says. The
smuggler decided to hitchhike -- and accepted a ride from a park
employee, who wondered why anyone would be kayaking in November.

The employee alerted park security. The kayaker, who was carrying a
load of marijuana, was arrested and spent several months in jail.

Cowan warns that there's still a potential for danger, no matter how
hapless some smugglers are. ''There's big money involved here. There
are big (jail) sentences involved,'' he says. ''When backed into a
corner, those criminals could be a potential threat to unsuspecting
tourists.''

In fact, rangers say what worries them most is the safety of the
park's legitimate visitors. Officials emphasize that their parks are
extremely safe. But one park visitor was assaulted recently near the
Mexican border, and rangers fear that there may be more such incidents
as cross-border drug traffic rises.

''The potential's there for anything to happen at any time,'' says
Joel Wright, the park service agent in El Paso. ''The potential for
violence is there daily.''

Rangers are doing what they can. But the anti-drug work done by park
rangers is only one small skirmish in a much larger war, and many park
officials say there is never enough money and not enough staff to
stanch the flow of drugs.

''I don't want to be pessimistic,'' says Dan Wirth, a Tucson-based
special agent for the park service. ''But with the current staffing
and funding we have, we're never going to adequately stem the tide of
drug trafficking through public lands. We're just too
overwhelmed.''

Rangers have always dealt with a darker side of park use. Criminals
have prowled the national parks since before they were national parks.
The tequila-like liquor mescal, for example, has been smuggled from
Mexico through land that's now U.S. parks for decades.

These days some smugglers are better organized, have much more money
and can afford better technology than they could in the past,
officials say. Traffickers use encrypted communications and conduct
their own surveillance of law enforcement agencies and park rangers.
They might carry cell phones, night-vision goggles and automatic weapons.

Smugglers also rely on a combination of camouflage and
chutzpah.

At seaside parks, they've been found carrying fishing poles and
camping gear while waiting on the beach for a shipment. In Big Bend
National Park in southern Texas, rangers once trailed a suspicious
motor home, chief ranger Bill Wright says. The occupants coolly stayed
in character. ''They jumped out of the truck and started taking
pictures of the country,'' Wright recalls. ''They had a camera and a
cooler'' -- and 70 pounds of marijuana hidden in a tire.

At some parks, smuggling is so prevalent that unsuspecting visitors
have seen traffickers at work. Rangers would rather keep them unaware.
''We don't tell them, 'Oh, you probably saw a load being delivered,'
'' Bill Wright says dryly. ''It doesn't add to the visitor
experience.''

Sometimes the contact is more direct. In July, a visitor strolling the
beach at Gulf Islands National Seashore -- a collection of islands and
mainland parcels in Mississippi and Florida -- found a bundle marked
with gold seals bearing the words ''Republic of Colombia.'' The man
reported his find to a ranger: two bricks of cocaine with a combined
street value of $50,000.

In 1997 at the Coronado National Memorial on the Mexican border near
Hereford, Ariz., suspected drug smugglers pushed a female visitor down
a hill, then stole her sport-utility vehicle. They drove the vehicle
to Mexico. The woman was not seriously hurt and her vehicle was
recovered, but no one was caught.

At Organ Pipe, near the town of Why, Ariz., visitors occasionally
stumble across drug caches. Several years ago, an off-trail hiker
found a duffel bag in the desert holding 11 pounds of marijuana.

While such incidents are rare, the evidence of drug trafficking is
plentiful at the park. Steering a patrol truck, ranger Pearson drives
north along State Highway 85, which runs from the Mexican border
almost to Phoenix. He stops at what looks like any other wide spot in
the road and walks a few hundred feet off the blacktop, which is
already sizzling in the heat of a desert morning.

At the base of some dark volcanic rocks overlooking the road, Pearson
finds a heap of old gunny sacks and ropes. They're the remains of
homemade backpacks for smuggling drugs.

''This was probably a load of 300 to 400 pounds,'' he says, examining
the trash. ''It looks like they delivered the load right here.''

A shipment of that size has a street value of roughly $300,000, he
says. It probably was carried 8 to 10 miles across the desert by young
Mexican men known as ''mules.''

''The mules are just kids, tough kids, and they pack it across on
their backs,'' Pearson says. ''You've seen sugar bags of nylon mesh.
They'll pack it in that, 50 pounds (apiece). These guys are tough,
they're strong.'' Many are in their teens and 20s, Pearson says, and
''are not getting paid much to do this. From what I hear, they're
getting $200, $300.''

Some of the mules die in the attempt; others end up in American
prisons.

Twenty feet from the pile of rubbish Pearson has been inspecting is a
trail worn by the feet of smugglers and illegal immigrants. The trail
is littered with one-gallon plastic water jugs. The smugglers usually
travel under cover of darkness, so they spray-paint the jugs black for
camouflage. Crews pick up thousands of jugs each year, Pearson says.

Park officials are also dismayed by the damage done by couriers. In
the fragile desert, a trail used only once can take 30 years to fade;
trails used frequently can be all but permanent.

When smugglers tear across the desert in cars to avoid agents, ''they
may mow down a 2-foot saguaro that's 50 years old,'' ranger Susan
Hughes says. ''They don't care what they're driving over.''

Smugglers passing through Organ Pipe try to avoid detection. But if
they've been seen, they sometimes take desperate, though not
necessarily violent, measures, Pearson says.

Park service trucks have been rammed by smugglers' vehicles. And
smugglers carrying drugs in their trunks, when spotted by authorities,
sometimes roar back to Mexico at 90 mph-plus on Highway 85, which
carries thousands of people a day. ''One of these days, there's going
to be a bad accident,'' Pearson says, ''and people are going to be
killed.''