AGENCIES WORK TO CLEAR OUT POT FARMS' DAMAGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT

For the past few years, crumpled Ramen noodle packaging, Coke cans
and half-full bags of fertilizer have languished on a remote hillside
in Bothe National Park.

Long, black irrigation tubes wove through the area just underneath
the surface of the soil.

A pair of jeans, boots and other clothing items lay caked with mud
among the leaves.

They were the remnants of what was once an illegal marijuana farm,
which drug agents raided about two years ago.

Local and state officials returned to the area Thursday to clear out
the trash, in perhaps the first government-led clean-up effort in at
least eight years, said Gary Pitkin, Napa Special Investigations
Bureau Commander.

The farm site was one of three that several local and state agencies
cleared out: two on Bothe land and another near Aetna Springs on the
Cleary Reserve.

With the help of a National Guard Pave Hawk helicopter -- a souped up
Black Hawk -- they hoisted 1,520 pounds of trash to the Angwin
Airport. From there, it was taken to a local dump.

This is the beginning a new effort to remove what is left of farms
that the bureau previously eradicated with the help of the state's
Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) team, a multi-agency group
that works to destroy illegal pot farms statewide, officials said.

In Napa County, officials generally destroy 25 to 35 large-scale pot
farms and an average of 90,000 plants each year, Pitkin said. In his
eight or nine years with the bureau, he hasn't had enough resources
to go back in to clean up the garbage left behind, he said.

This year, however, the marijuana coordinator at his office contacted
the National Guard about helping Napa County clean up its public
lands. The guard's Joint Task Force Domestic Support Counter Drug
unit out of Moffett agreed to help.

"That was really the linchpin," he said. "That's critical to our
efforts because without their air support, this wouldn't have been practical."

Damage Done

The illegal marijuana farms that pop up on both public and private
land in Napa County are mostly thought to be the fruit of Mexican
drug trafficking organizations.

The illegal marijuana trade has a range of impacts, from the
financing they provide a larger drug trade to security issues on
public lands, officials say.

"The last thing we want is Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts on a nature
hike encountering some of these drug grows," Pitkin said.

But they also leave environmental imprint, officials said.

Growers use pesticides, herbicides and rat poisons that can seep into
groundwater, said Mike Lair, supervising ranger for California State
Parks in Napa County.

"Everything runs downhill, downstream into the creeks," he said.

Rodents that have consumed the poisons suffer, as well as animals
that eat the rodents.

Growers use detergents to bathe and wash clothing in creeks, Lair said.

To set up the garden, the growers terrace the hillside, rooting up
the existing plants. The new landscape can cause erosion and even
landslides, he said.

They dam and divert streams, then pipe the water to the farms to
water the plants.

In the Bothe farm, about a 40-minute hike from Bail Grist Mill, the
growers had hollowed out the burned trunk of a tree to use as a garbage pit.

State Park Ranger Paul Borg dug up egg cartons, tuna cans, plastic
wrappers -- and the smell of sewage.

Other garbage littered a thatched shelter growers had built using
tree branches. It included a bag of crystallized fertilizer, propane
cans and spray bottles they used to feed the plants.

"You can see from this, it's a huge resource effort," he said of the
manpower required to haul out the trash.

Cleaning up the grows also helps remove the infrastructure that might
tempt growers to return, Pitkin said.

If officials don't do it, "they can come back next year and pick up
where they left off," he said.

Lack of Resources

Drug agents often don't have the time and people to launch clean up
efforts like these, he said.

"We're simply overwhelmed as it is with drug investigations," Pitkin said.

The CAMP team's sole mission is to assist with eradication. Napa
County has their help for only a limited time, and they usually can't
get to all the gardens the bureau has spotted, he said.

If officials must chose between eradication and clean up, they chose
the former, he said.

"If we stopped to remediate all the of the growing operations, we
would undermine CAMP's own mission and our own mission to eradicate
illegally grown marijuana," Pitkin said.

State Parks faces similar manpower limitations, Lair said. But
they're working to establish a relationship with NSIB and other
agencies to do more, he said.

By the end of their visit to the Bothe farm Thursday, Lair, Borg and
volunteer Brady Moran had wrestled more than a dozen large garbage
bags full of trash to a clearing near the top of the hillside and
pulled up long strings of irrigation hose.

They grouped the bags and coils of hose into a net. The Pave Hawk
helicopter dipped down above them, its powerful rotors whipping tree
limbs and dust into the air.

Fighting against the wind, they connected a hook that hung from the
belly of the helicopter to the net.

Then the bird lifted the trash away, restoring quiet to the forest as
it retreated.