Huge pot-growing operations are trashing Los Padres National Forest, and no one’s cleaning them up.

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So who’s left holding the trash bag? It’s the Forest Service’s job to make sure that busted pot sites get cleaned up and restored, but Gould admits it ain’t happening in Los Padres. Staff and budget shortages are his excuse – but two men accuse him of frustrating other efforts to get the job done.

Deputy Gonzalez says he’s offered to gather a team of officers to clean up the wasted gardens. Gould, he claims, has been unresponsive. The patrol captain counters that Gonzalez has never made that offer. Pressed to clarify, they both hold their ground. The relationship between the two appears to be tense.

The Sheriff’s Department is in charge of pot busts, but Gonzalez – who coordinates with the state-run CAMP – has to report anything done on Los Padres land to Gould. Gould, as head of the forest’s law enforcement team, is required to support the county’s work and deal with the aftermath. The tension between the two agencies may simply be a power clash.

After noticing that the government is getting little done by way of cleanup, a local conservation activist stepped up.

Tom Hopkins, president of the Ventana Wilderness Alliance, approached District Ranger Bradford in the summer of 2006 with a proposal to lead a squad of volunteers in cleaning up and restoring the busted pot gardens in Los Padres. He’d worked with a volunteer crew doing similar work in the Sierra and Sequoia National Forests, where the patrol captain was grateful for it, so he figured his idea would be well received. Mounds of trash in the wilderness? Landscapes to be restored? For free? His crew had done it before.

VWA, a 7-year-old nonprofit, has 300 dues-paying members and about a dozen regular volunteers who put in thousands of hours of trail work per year, Hopkins boasts. A few years ago they hauled out more than 10,000 pounds of junk from a historic mining site on Willow Creek in Los Padres’ Monterey Ranger District. An appreciative Bradford presented the volunteers with a plaque of honor.

But after nine meetings with Bradford and one with Gould, Hopkins feels that his year-old proposal to lead VWA into the pot gardens is going nowhere. He hasn’t even been allowed to see one of the big, messy sites to assess the damage and formulate a clean-up plan. He senses that Bradford is receptive to letting volunteers do the neglected work, but that Gould – the ultimate decision-maker on this front – is being obdurate.

“No progress has been gained,” Hopkins says dolefully, trudging up a sunny stretch of bluff trail overlooking the ocean. “We’ve not been able to convince them that it’s an appropriate thing for volunteers to do. And yet it has to be done. It’s a lot of hard work, but there are people who want to do it. We need the cooperation of the Forest Service, and right now we don’t have it.”

Technically, he doesn’t actually need it. If his volunteers can figure out where the busted pot gardens are located – and Gould hasn’t closed any of the sites to the public – they can simply hike in and clean them up. But Hopkins says that if he’s going to lead his crew into potentially dangerous places, he wants the Forest Service to have his back.

Still, he’s getting impatient. Hopkins has been hiking Big Sur since the 1960s, and it pains him to think of trash festering on the public land he cherishes. So he’s trained his eye to spot outdoor pot.

Last spring, while surveying former pastureland near the border of Los Padres and Limekiln State Park, Hopkins noticed a PVC pipe snaking down a gully. He followed it to a little sinsemilla garden hidden in a grove of oak and bay trees and reported the site’s GPS coordinates to Bradford. This summer, he leads me there.

The ganja plants are barely noticeable, nestled demurely among poison oak and pampas grass. We find a water-filled Rubberneck-turned-cistern weighed down by a tire filled with rocks. Under a nearby oak, a couple of tarps cover a pile of irrigation equipment. A little creature makes scrabbling sounds underneath it.

This particular operation, Hopkins admits rather sheepishly, isn’t representative of the dramatic damage being done elsewhere. He wants me to know that the real deal is much worse. “This could be someone growing for his own use,” he says.

He points out an 18-inch marijuana plant encircled in wire mesh. I hadn’t noticed it before, but squatting down next to it, I can appreciate its form. Sunlight falls through the oak trees to illuminate the tiny hairs on its jagged leaves. Still a seedling, it hasn’t produced any bud or stink yet.

The sight of little Mary Jane makes Hopkins – a naturalist who had delighted over sticky monkey flower and sorrel on our hike here – frown. “We don’t take a position on the appropriateness of marijuana,” he says carefully, standing an arm’s length away from the plant. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to use public land for any agricultural enterprise, legal or illegal.”