rangerdanger was this you?..LOL j/k, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT Photos by KENT PORTER / PD California State Parks rangers Bill Walton, middle, Michael Stephenson, left, and Dave Horvitz pull out marijuana plants at one of 10 pot gardens found Friday in the Austin Creek Recreation area near Guerneville. Rangers and deputies from the the Sonoma County Sheriff's narcotics unit uprooted more than 23,000 plants. Zoom Photo | Buy Photo ? ONE OF COUNTY'S BIGGEST BUSTS 23,652 pot plants found growing in Austin Creek State Recreation Area. 28,000 plants found in Sonoma County in all of 2004. Crop's street value could have been around $40 million Investigators pursued a tip deep into one of Sonoma County's largest parks Friday, and confronted an armed man guarding what is believed to be one of the biggest marijuana-growing operations in county history. The guard fled, not heeding a warning shot, evading sheriff's deputies who chased him for about 400 yards through thick brush, Sheriff's Lt. Roger Rude said. The guard left behind 23,652 pot plants near the southern edge of the Austin Creek State Recreation Area, north of Guerneville and adjoining the Armstrong Redwoods State Preserve. "This is one of the largest grows we've ever found," Rude said. "Everybody's scratching their head trying to remember a bigger one." In 2004, the sheriff's narcotics unit and state authorities together seized 28,000 plants in Sonoma County, he said. Both the Austin Creek area and the redwood preserve, which attract about a million visitors a year, were shut for hours Friday. Authorities turned away about 100 people in the morning and afternoon until the parks were reopened. A hunter stumbled upon the gardens early Friday, marked the location on a global positioning system device, and alerted authorities. Two deputies and a park ranger hiked in and, at about 10:30 a.m., reached the gardens, about 2 miles from the Bullfrog Pond Campground, in a canyon deep within a sprawling backcountry of hills gone tan and gold in the summer sun, chest-high thistles and forests of fir, ash, oak, manzanita and redwood. Hearing someone cutting brush - often used to erect barriers around pot gardens - the deputies moved in and one, Andy Cash, was confronted with a man approaching him with a drawn revolver. As Cash ordered him to stop, the man turned and ran, ignoring a shot that Cash fired into the ground, Rude said. The deputies asked for air support but no helicopters were available at the Sheriff's Department, CHP or National Guard. "This is the ugly side of the marijuana problem ... a grow on public land that any citizen out hiking or hunting could stumble on, and it's protected by an armed guard," Rude said. Both Austin Creek and Armstrong Redwoods were closed for several hours while deputies searched for the man and cleared out the gardens. The crop of young plants about 2 to 3 feet tall was in 10 gardens that came together in a "sea of green," said Sheriff's Sgt. Chris Bertoli, who heads the county narcotics task force. Depending how many of the plants were female - from which the prized marijuana buds are repeatedly harvested in the final months of the growing season -the crop's street value could have been in the neighborhood of $40 million, Bertoli said. Marijuana plants typically yield a pound or more of saleable pot, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration puts the street price of the drug at between $400 and $1,000 a pound in the western United States. The operation's size - there were irrigation lines drawing from a nearby spring, a man-made reservoir and a camp with at least five toothbrushes left behind - evidenced sophisticated backers, Bertoli said. "This is organized crime behind this," he said. "This is strictly commercial, pure profit, large amounts of money." The armed man who bolted into the bush and remains at large is "at the bottom of the food chain," Rude said.
Naw, not me. That many plants indicates the grower's stupidity. 23k+ plants is insane. I dispute the statement that all the plants were between 2'--3' tall. It would have taken dozens of people months to prep an area big enough to grow all those plants and that's if they had access and used multiple tractors. Also many many thousands of $$$ worth of potting soil, and a 1/4 million $ irrigation system. Betcha anything that the vast majority of plants were planted by a guy dragging a stick along the ground and dropping a few seeds per inch in unprepared soil. I've come across grows like that (not that many plants), both as a hiker and in my duties as a Forest Service volunteer. 99% of the plants don't survive without amended soil and the few that do survive are small, scraggly plants, heavily seeded. Because there is no way to nute that many plants, nor cull males. A grow that extensive would have had little or no chance of remaining undetected (jeez it was only 2 miles from a campground), and there would be no way to keep it secret with as many people as it would have required involved. I also dispute the statement that most pot plants yield a lb. of buds per plant. Carefully and indivually cared for, yeah. With that many plants it would have required at least a hundred people, and more than that during prep, planting, harvesting and manicuring. Most of my Nat'l Forest grows were south of Sonoma County, and the most plants I've tended alone is less than 100, and with partners maybe twice that, in several different locations. I remember reading once about a large grow op busted. The official statement listed the # of plants and acreage involved, and my mathmatician friend figured that, if true, the plants would have had to have been planted less than 2" apart.
