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

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Adding to Hopkins’ vexation is the knowledge that another volunteer crew already cleans up busted pot gardens in other parts of the state.  

Around 2003, Kevin Mayer, patrol captain for the Sierra and Sequoia National Forests, approached High Sierra Volunteer Crew leader Shane Krogen to brief him on the problem. Krogen offered to help, and his crew of about 35 volunteers has been cleaning up trashed cannabis grows ever since.

The volunteers follow a set of common-sense safety rules, Krogen says. They work during the off-season for pot cultivation – from October to early April – with law enforcement escorts. The volunteers hike into the busted sites and pile up the garbage, usually over the course of three days, and Highway Patrol helicopters long-line it out.

Under a written agreement, medical care for any injuries sustained by the volunteers on the job are covered by the Forest Service, Mayer says. But so far, the worst injuries have been tick bites and poison oak rashes.

“We haven’t been shot at. We don’t find booby traps,” Krogen says nonchalantly. “These cartels do not want to draw attention to what they’re doing, and when you start harming people it brings down undue pressure upon them.”

Krogen emphasizes the difference between the industrial gardens of 5,000 or more plants and the mom-and-pop operations of a few hundred. His crew generally deals with the former. “The environmental impact of a 200 or 300 plant operation is almost nothing,” he says.

After cleaning up the trash, volunteers do minor restoration work such as filling in plant holes, removing plastic and sediment from stream channels, and re-directing brush to prevent erosion.

Krogen charges roughly $3,000 to $5,000 per cleanup for overhead costs such as food, fuel and paperwork, and the Forest Service supplies helicopters and support staff to haul out the trash. Krogen estimates, and Mayer agrees, that the agency would have to spend at least 10 times as much to do the same work with paid staff.

Krogen’s Fresno-based crew has done such impressive work in the Sierras that forest managers have invited them to clean up busted pot sites across the state. Last October, they completed a job at Castle Rock State Park near Santa Cruz.

“It’s hard for us to see why the same thing can’t be done in a National Forest in a local area,” says Hopkins, plodding back down the trail toward the highway. As we break out of a shady, dank redwood grove the ocean view opens before us like a new scene in a play. The effect makes me feel kinda high.