IN CALIFORNIA FORESTS, MARIJUANA GROWERS THRIVE

SAN FRANCISCO -- Lt. Sonny LeGault and 11 other officers from the
Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department woke before dawn one recent
morning, hiked three miles through the woods and just missed the
apparently hungry men they had hoped to arrest.

"They'd been cooking breakfast: there were a couple of quails dressed
out, and a soup going," Lieutenant LeGault said. "But they were gone."

Those the officers had been hunting were workers at one of the scores
of remote, highly organized outdoor marijuana "grows" that dot the
vast forests of California, largely on federal property.

Long a fixture of the nation's public lands, such criminal
agricultural enterprises, law enforcement officials say, have
increased greatly in recent years. And they were cast squarely into
the limelight this week when the authorities said a 90,000-acre Santa
Barbara County wildfire, known as the La Brea fire, had begun with a
campfire built by marijuana growers believed to be low-level workers
for a Mexican drug cartel.

The fire, which started on Aug. 8, is expected to be fully contained
on Saturday. About the only thing that did not burn, Lieutenant
LeGault said, were the areas where growers had been watering some
30,000 marijuana plants.

"Ironically, it probably saved their lives," he said of the growers,
who have eluded arrest.

Officials say the rise in the number of such grows has resulted in
part from a tightening of the border with Mexico.

"It's made it much more difficult for the cartels to smuggle into the
country, particularly marijuana, which is large and bulky," said the
Santa Barbara County sheriff, Bill Brown. "It's easier to grow it here."

California is also popular with marijuana growers for all the reasons
that customary farmers like it. "The conditions are very conducive:
the water and the soil and the sunshine," Sheriff Brown said.

According to the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a multiagency
task force managed by the state's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement,
this year is already one for the record books. In more than 425 raids
since late June, some 3.4 million plants have been seized, up from
2.9 million all of last year. And, officials note, they still have
roughly a month and a half before the campaign expires with the end
of harvest season.

Raids occur daily, from southern counties like Riverside, where some
27,000 plants were found on July 2, to northern ones like Lake and
Shasta, in each of which more than 400,000 plants have been destroyed
by the authorities this year. (Mature plants are usually incinerated,
younger ones simply uprooted.)

About 2.7 million plants, nearly 80 percent of the seized crop, have
been found on federal, state or other public lands. Officials
attribute the plants' prevalence there to the vast area investigators
are expected to cover.

"It's rugged terrain, very difficult to get to and very difficult to
see," said John Heil, a spokesman for the United States Forest
Service, which in California has jurisdiction over 20.6 million
acres, home to nearly 60 percent of this year's seizures.

Mr. Heil said drug operators could be blamed for a handful of
wildfires each year in California, which is already dealing with a
prolonged drought and budget-stretched firefighting resources.
Environmental damage of a different kind can also be severe, with
pesticides seeping into soil and streams, and trash and human waste
left behind.

Lieutenant LeGault said he was impressed by how far marijuana growers
would go -- deeper into forests, higher in the mountains -- in an
effort to avoid detection. "They call it a wilderness because it is,"
he said. "Not even the billy goats go there."

Once established, Lieutenant LeGault said, the workers, usually in
teams of 4 to 10, must labor hard to cultivate. Streams and springs
are dammed to provide water for irrigation, with miles of irrigation
line laid. Plants are laid out under trees to avoid surveillance by
law enforcement aircraft, and large areas for planting are sometimes
cleared of brush, rocks and so forth by hand.

Living is rudimentary. In the case of the camp that started the La
Brea fire, workers seemed to have been sleeping in small dirt beds
next to a handmade irrigation pool, with tarps hung overhead.

Then there is the natural world to contend with. Marijuana workers
often set traps or diversions for bears, hanging bags of food from
far-removed trees. Poison is laid out for rats and other rodents that
apparently do not mind the taste of marijuana, which is usually dried
and packaged at the camps.

But the biggest danger for growers is law enforcement. Lieutenant
LeGault and his fellow officers often land at camps via helicopter,
dangling in the air on harnesses and ropes.

Yet arrests are rare. Growers are typically armed, but they most
often flee if they hear helicopters overhead or officers hiking
toward them. In Santa Barbara County, officials say that in 18 raids,
they have netted 225,000 plants but made no arrests.

Lieutenant LeGault said he would love to catch someone, but he
understands the odds of running down anyone so deep in the woods.

"It's like fighting any crime," he said. "This is just a little more
physically challenging."