ast fall, a pair of park rangers were busy marking the boundary where Sequoia National Park meets Sequoia National Forest when they came upon two men toting automatic weapons. As soon as the armed men realized they’d been spotted, they dropped their weapons and ran, but the reluctant criminals were soon caught in the nearby village of Wawona. The park rangers on the scene soon realized they’d stumbled upon a crop of more than 6,000 marijuana plants straddling the boundary between these protected public lands.
Although scenes like this one are far from commonplace, recent years have seen a precipitous rise in the growth of illegal substances on national parklands. Last year, rangers in Sequoia captured and removed more than 44,000 marijuana plants with a street value of $176 million—one-third more than had been removed the year before. Meanwhile, Yosemite rangers discovered another budding operation: 1,400 plants just outside the park’s boundary to go along with the crop bordering the Sequoia National Forest. These troubling developments were among the more prominent issues highlighted in NPCA’s recent report, Faded Glory: Top Ten Reasons to Invest in America’s National Park Heritage. But the trend doesn’t come as a complete surprise to rangers on the frontlines.
“Marijuana grows well in some of California’s national parks,” says Steve Shackelton, chief ranger at Yosemite National Park. “In the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, we’ve got steep cliffs, a warm climate with a long growing season, and very remote areas at the end of logging roads or trails, often near streams which provide access to water.”
Based on information obtained during investigations and arrests, the Park Service believes most of the individuals involved in these activities have links to Mexican crime families—many are illegal aliens brought into the country to do their dirty work.
“This trend is an unintended consequence of our endless attempts to tighten the borders since 9/11,” says Bill Tweed, chief park naturalist at Sequoia National Park. “Today, the Mexican border is tighter than it has been in ages, so it’s harder to bring large bulk crops into the country. Ironically, that brings an increased incentive to [grow marijuana] within the U.S. And further, because our drug laws are written to allow for confiscation of private lands used to grow drugs, it just makes more sense to use public land.”
Neither Shackelton nor Tweed have any illusions that the National Park Service is about to bring an end to the country’s recreational drug use after millions of dollars and years of law enforcement efforts have failed to do so. But they’re quick to point out that the national parks were set aside to provide the highest degree of protection of any lands in the country, and these marijuana farms are destroying natural vegetation, bringing water to areas that were once dry, and spreading pesticides and herbicides, while these homesteaders are poaching wild animals and introducing the risk of more extreme damage: In Yosemite, growers are cooking food with open fires and using camping stoves with propane tanks, providing plenty of opportunities to start a wildfire in the shadows of 2,800-year-old sequoia trees, which would be difficult for firefighters to reach quickly. Some rival crime families have even been known to intentionally set fire to the crops of competitors, although such sabotage hasn’t yet taken place in a national park.
Beyond the threat to the environment is the obvious threat to park visitors. Because most of the areas used for planting are so remote, the odds of hikers encountering armed men are equally remote. But as park rangers are forced to focus on these threats to natural resources and visitor enjoyment, they’re being stretched even thinner.
“We have a diminishing ranger force and a proliferating number of visitors, so instead of helping people have an excellent visit to Yosemite, we have to shunt manpower to address this scourge,” says Shackelton. In an attempt to make that work a little easier, rangers are closing off certain roads and limiting access to many areas within the park. That makes it difficult for growers to bring in seedlings, fertilizer, and other supplies, but it also limits visitor access.
Because the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are generally too busy to offer their manpower and expertise, the Park Service has been forced to train rangers to carry out tasks that are a far cry from their traditional roles of leading hikes and hosting campfire chats.
“Last year some of our rangers were learning military tactics, like how to respond with automatic weapons to hostile fire coming from sources you cannot see—the sort of thing our military teaches soldiers in Iraq,” says Tweed. “Because the park system isn’t generously funded, we have to handle this situation without a lot of extra resources, balancing the attention we devote to these issues given all the other things we need to do in a park that’s as big as a New England state, hosts a million visitors a year, and has hundreds of miles of trails and hundreds of campsites.”
Just locating a marijuana crop among so many thousands of acres is a huge victory, but it’s not the end of the struggle. Removing and destroying thousands of plants is a challenge within itself. Yosemite has used a Huey military helicopter to airlift the plants out, then runs them through a wood chipper to create a packable material, which is finally burned; the destruction of one crop cost the park $15,000.
But the future may not be so bleak. While working as a ranger in one of Hawaii’s national parks, Shackelton was able to lead the charge to end a similar threat, with the help of local law enforcement and community members. Now similar efforts are under way in California.
“Our U.S. attorney in Sacramento is putting together a coalition under the aegis of his office as a federal prosecutor, inviting the cooperation of county sheriffs, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Naturalization Service all working together,” says Shackelton. “We’re going to do our best to work with the environmental community, hiking groups, camping interests, ranchers, and local landowners, and we’re even hoping that human rights activists will join us to view this as a community problem that needs to be eliminated. These growers are mercenaries—their goal is simply to make money—so we’re trying to show them that growing marijuana in the Sierra Nevadas is simply a bad business decision.”
