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

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In reporting this story, I begin to share some of Hopkins’ frustrations with Gould. Over the course of eight weeks in communication, he is unable to schedule an in-person interview with me. We talk in sporadic bursts when I am able to catch him on his cell phone, but he won’t commit to taking me out to a busted pot site himself.

Frankly, he doesn’t seem keen on the idea of civilians poking around in pot fields. Even though Hopkins discovered and reported the garden bordering Limekiln – and submitted a detailed report of our subsequent visit there – Gould gets upset that we’d gone in without a police escort. “It’s lucky you didn’t get shot,” he tells me gruffly. “It’s not the way we do business.”

He has a point: Tromping around in illicit drug production scenes is a stupid thing for clueless civilians to do. But if the cleanup work can’t be done without a Forest Service escort, it’s hard to imagine it getting done at all. While I badgered him this summer, Gould shuffled between administrative marathons at the office, some of the season’s biggest forest fires, and a seemingly endless string of pot busts. He simply had other priorities.

Gould is taking his time with the idea of a volunteer marijuana garden cleanup crew, he says, because he wants to do it right. It’s not that he has anything against the volunteers. To the contrary: He relies on them to do trail and restoration work. “The Forest Service welcomes the volunteers,” he insists. He just wants them to be safe.  

 “We’re concerned about booby traps, we’re concerned about armed confrontation, we’re concerned about HAZMAT [hazardous materials] contamination. All that has to be documented,” he says by cell phone from the side of an undisclosed highway. “Safety is paramount.”

In hopes of creating a “well-organized, well-documented” operating plan, Gould says he’ll borrow pages from fellow Capt. Mayer’s playbook, adapting the Sierra team’s plan to the Los Padres cleanups. Krogen has even offered to train Hopkins’ crew.

 “I’m optimistic that it will happen,” Gould says. “My forecast is, by next year we will have an operating plan and we can start cleaning up site by site. Until then, the Forest Service is going to continue what we’re doing.”

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Anytime a Californian loads up a bong with anonymously-grown outdoor weed, she takes a gamble on what she’s smoking.   

Might be pot that was responsibly cultivated. Might have been grown on a heavily eroded slope that choked up a steelhead spawning stream. Might be doused with rodenticides that poisoned voles and coyotes. Without a medical marijuana prescription, the average pothead has a hard time being an Earth-friendly consumer.

As long as recreational cannabis is criminalized and people are smoking it, it’ll be grown on public land, unregulated and under cover. Most of those operations will continue to generate trash that, left alone, poisons animals and elements.

Gould says that Forest Service employees were able to clean up fewer than three of the 17 pot gardens – totaling 83,000 plants – busted in Los Padres last year. “I’m sure that was just the tip of the iceberg,” he admits. “There’s probably twice as much out there that’s undetected.”

Even with a volunteer squad to help with the task, Mayer estimates that only about 25 percent of the Sierra-Sequoia’s busted pot gardens get cleaned up: “It’s a losing game at the moment.”

While bureaucrats hedge the issue and volunteers try their best to deal with the trash, stressed-out Americans continue to light up. And a growing network of stoner suppliers nibbles at the last remnants of our nation’s wilderness.