Early on Friday, November 21, ForestWatch volunteers convened in a packed conference room of the Santa Barbara District Ranger Office along with officials from the US Forest Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and members of various media organizations, as law enforcement officers gave an extensive safety briefing on what was to come. A little over an hour later, the team was led by law enforcement on their hike to the recently discovered Cannabis grow site hidden beneath the scrub oak community of the Figueroa Mountain foothills.
Once they had arrived on the ridge line above the grow site, they waited for law enforcement below to give an all-clear signal before heading down the slope and into the network of grow sites and living quarters carved out beneath the stands of scrub oak. While the plants themselves had long-since been removed, evidence of the past-grow site was everywhere. Large sections of the slope were carved into terraces and irrigation hoses were laid through each. Hazardous fertilizers, herbicides, and rodenticides stored in cracked milk jugs were left strewn about 
along the sides of the site. A makeshift kitchen was littered with hundreds of grocery bags filled with trash and food boxes with beer cans and hard alcohol bottles brazenly tossed into the mix. A sleeping area composed of sleeping bags and clothes scattered throughout the leaf detritus was a short walk away.
The team set to work cutting out huge lengths of irrigation tubes and gathering up the remnants of the makeshift life below the scrub oak. They had worked for about an hour and a half before each and every trash bag they brought was filled past the brim–and the team hadn’t even seen the rest of the site, including the area the growers had tapped the small spring that flows down into the Santa Ynez river.
Huge thank you to our dedicated volunteers! Your continued hard work and devotion is the only reason we can do the work we do!
This site will require many more outings in order to get all of the trash, and there are many more sites like it. Marijuana grow sites in the Los Padres National Forest pose a substantial threat to our wildlife, watersheds, and safety. ForestWatch will continue to work diligently with the US Forest Service to see to their complete removal.
Huge thank you to UCSB’s Coastal Fund for supporting ForestWatch’s summer and fall volunteer projects!
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