“It Kept Going And Going And Going”

DAYTON - It was a bright day in early August.

The National Guard helicopter hovered several hundred feet above the canyons in the Eckler Mountain area of the Umatilla National Forest when the spotter in the cockpit first noticed the pattern on the steep hill: a terraced slope with carefully spaced plants of a slightly darker color than the surrounding vegetation.

It was just the beginning.

Upon closer inspection, the spotter noticed more "grows" spread out along hundreds of yards on two branches of the canyon between the creek bed below and the tall pines above. He knew he had found something big, very big.

"It just kept going and going and going," said Jeff Jenkins, the Columbia County sheriff's deputy and narcotics specialist. Jenkins followed up on the spotter's report from the ground and went in Thursday with a large multiagency drug eradication task force to take down and destroy the sprawling marijuana growing operation.

"It was wrapped around the foot of that hill in two directions," he said.

What officials found and later destroyed turned out to be the largest pot bust of the year in the state: nearly 26,000 marijuana plants with an estimated street value of $25.7 million. It came just one day after they arrested two Mexican nationals tending to another, smaller grow in the Hartsock area less than a quarter mile from privately owned land.

With the arrest in mid-July of a first Mexican national, Santiago Orozco Contreras, whose camp and marijuana grow were found in the Cold Creek area, and with the discovery of a fourth operation late last month, law enforcement officials have taken down about 37,000 pot plants with $37 million this summer, with the prospect of more to come.

"It's been busy," Jenkins said. "We have a lot of leads to follow up on."

And that's what concerns the narcotics deputy about the recent discoveries.

"It's just the tip of the iceberg," he said. "It's an organized group that's doing this with the money men as far south as Mexico. It's huge."

Interviews with law enforcement officials and court documents provide details of last week's busts and give a glimpse into a problem that has plagued Columbia County and other remote mountainous regions across the west for some time.

The kind of drug eradication scenes one might associate with the jungles of Col omb i a are becoming com- mon- place in the Blue Moun- tains and would be even more nume rous if searchand destroy operations were better funded, local law enforcement officials said.

Privately, drug enforcement officials fear they're finding and eradicating less than one-tenth of the grow operations in the vast wildernesses of the Northwest.

Border Squeeze

The marijuana proliferation problem began more than a de c ade ago .

With the increasing populari ty of marijuana and steppedup border cont rols, Mexi- can criminal groups found it more and more profitable to grow pot inside U.S. borders on sites in California, Oregon and Washington.

According to the 2010 Drug Threat Assessment report of the U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center, the benefits of producing large quantities of marijuana in the United States include direct access to a large customer base, as well as avoiding the risk of detection seizure at U.S.-Mexico borders.

Add to that the growing cost of fuel and transportation, and Mexican groups had every reason to set up shop on remote public lands.

From 2004 to 2008, the last year for which such figures appear to be available, more than 11 million plants were eradicated on federal public lands. The number of plants eradicated increased 300 percent over this 5-year period from more than 1 million to more than 4 million, according to the report.

"Public lands are often used for cannabis cultivation because (drug traffickers) benefit from the remote location that seemingly limits the chance of detection and allows them to maintain such activities without ownership of any land that can be seized by law enforcement or tracked back to a participating member," the NDIC said.

Jenkins said it's hard to estimate just how much land in the Umatilla National Forest is under illegal marijuana cultivation. At 1.4 million acres, the mountainous area is almost the size of Delaware or the Sultanate of Brunei. More than 1 million acres are in Oregon, but the bulk of the land on the Washington side of the state line, or almost 160,000 acres, is in Columbia County.

Keeping such a vast expanse of rugged terrain under constant surveillance is impossible, even if law enforce- ment agencies had more resources.

So the proliferation of pot grows continues and not without its risks.

"The increased prevalence of these grow sites on publicly accessible lands has resulted in numerous armed confrontations with hikers, hunters, and passersby unwittingly entering active cultivation sites," the national report concluded.

One such confrontation involving a camper earlier this summer, reportedly led to the discovery and eradication of a large grow in the Robinette Mountain area, where officers took down 6,800 plants with a street value of $6.8 million. The suspects had already fled the scene.

In each of the three arrests this summer, the Mexican suspects were armed and, in one case, on the verge of using their weapons.

The discovery of two of the other three sites were the result of tips from hunters. Only the big Eckler Moun to tain grow was found after aerial detection.

"We get lots of tips from the community," Jenkins said. "So we tell people to share information with us, such as strange activity like trash in the forest and so on."

The Network

Contreras and the two suspects from Eckler Mountain, Jose Meraz Farias, 42, and Martin Chipres Madriz, 43, are merely the grunts doing the hard work on behalf of their bosses, Jenkins said.

Typically, they are dropped off (to avoid detection of vehicles) and supplied for weeks on end in their remote locations, where they live in make-shift camps and tend to their crops, going as far as using herbicides to keep the native vegetation from encroaching on their plots.

They find small creek beds as their water source, using plastic pipes to get the water to the grows. The moist environment of the creek bed and warm summer temperatures make for prime pot-growing conditions.

The plants that were taken from Eckler Mountain were as tall as eight feet, making the plants potentially more profitable but also easier to see from the air. Law enforcement agents wait until it's almost harvest time to run their detection missions so they have the best shot at seeing the cultivated areas.

After being dropped off by their suppliers, who often run a number of operations in a larger area, the narco farmers slip into the rugged terrain and hide their tracks by using fallen logs to avoid making trails.

They pitch camps under the cover of the pines above their plots. It usually only takes two growers to run the "farm" with extra help brought in for planting and harvest seasons. Each growing cluster has several hundred plants

When the buds are ready for processing, the cultivators strip the leaves and hang the stalks with "fruit" upside down on a line to dry out for two days, then let them season for two more days atop plastic bags so most of the moisture can evaporate.

"These were good plants," Jenkins said. "They were going to get some serious crops off this lot."

The Arrests

This summer's rollup of cannabis operations started a year ago. A hunter called in a report of litter and other strange activities in the Cold Creek area.

Authorities didn't have a chance to follow up on the hunter's lead until July, but when they did they succeeded in making their first arrest among the elusive growers.

On July 18, a team of officers from the county and the U.S. Forest Service raided the camp of Orozco- Contreras. The Mexican was dressed in a camouflage shirt and hat washing clothes in a make-shift shelter, when a special Forest Service agent helping monitor the area announced his presence with a loud "police" warning.

Orozco immediatel y "looked up, saw (the agent), and his right hand went to his hip in a manner consistent of someone attempting to draw fire from a holster," according to court documents filed in the case against the grower.

The agent pointed his weapon at the suspect and told him to put his hands up, prompting Orozco to comply immediately. The suspect was wearing a .380-caliber pistol and had a knife sheath on his right side.

Officers subsequently discovered and removed 2,000 marijuana plants from the Cold Creek grow. Orozco Contreras was arrested, charged with manufacturing marijuana and being an alien in possession of a fire arm, and taken to Columbia County jail.

Held on $150,000 bail, he now faces possible federal indictment that could lead to a 5-year prison sentence if convicted.

The second raid that yielded arrests also came from an older tip involving the Hartsock area in a place bordering private land. As a big team on Thursday was gearing up to take down the grow spotted by helicopter in early August, a smaller team on Wednesday decided to follow up on an old tip to the state's Department Of Fish & Wildlife.

Jenkins and other members of the state's Marijuana Eradication Team hiked 2 miles off the top of Hartsock Grade. About 500 yards from the bottom of the canyon, they came across numerous small marijuana grows and a camp site.

"The team located two male subjects inside the grow near the camp site," Jenkins wrote in court documents supporting the case against the suspects.

The first was Madriz, "tending to the plants in one of the grows." Within the hour, they came across the second subject, Farias, just outside of the camp area. Both men were armed.

"Madriz was armed with a Browning .22 long rifle handgun and Farias was armed with a Smith & Wesson 9mm semi automatic handgun," Jenkins wrote.

Two hours after the arrests, the team began to process evidence around the grow and the camp site and load up the pot plants for eradication.

The two men face the same charges as Orozco Contreras with their case also of interest to federal authorities for prosecution, offering the prospect of sentences five times longer than those under state law.

It's not clear whether there's any connection between the grows or whether the three men belong to same criminal network. With threats made from the syndicates against growers and their families, suspects typically won't talk, Jenkins said.

One of the two recent suspects is kept in a Garfield County jail per standard procedure designed to keep suspects from the same operation separate, he added.

The Big Raid

In the end, officers did not make any arrests in Thursday's bust near Eckler Mountain, but they did rake in the biggest illegal crop in the state for 2011.

"I've been advised that this is the biggest grow eradicated this year in Washington state," Jenkins announced in a statement.

After the grow had been seen from the air, it still took several weeks to bring in a large team from the Cannabis Eradication Response Team.

Some 50 officers assembled for the action, including state troopers, Columbia County Sheriff's deputies, a SWAT team from Walla Walla County and the City of Walla Walla Police Department, the U.S. Forest Service, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, the Garfield County Sheriff's Office, the National Guard, Fish & Wildlife and even the Cheney Police Department, which brought in its canine unit .

After the aerial discovery, Jenkins put the roads in the grow's vicinity under surveillance, but the "farmers" had already left the area, he said. "We sat and watched the location from the hills for a while, but we never saw any movement."

Some of the team members took off from Walla Walla Airport to descend into the grow area from above, while others approached the location from the ground with a large truck on hand to remove the pot.

The ground operation, which included a blood hound and several German shepherds, began at 5 a.m. After deciding there would be no growers to arrest or hunt down, the team went in to begin dismantling the growing operation.

In this location, there were two abandoned camps, slightly more organized than those in the other grows and the crop was a sprawling string of stair-stepped plots reminiscent in size and steepness of rice paddies in parts of Southeast Asia.

It took until after 5 p.m. cut the plants down and send them up in the helicopter for transfer to the truck. About 30 of the officers were airlifted from the site after the operation, while the rest returned on foot.

Jenkins said the grow extended more than least 600 yards along the foot of a streambed canyon.

"Everywhere you looked there was marijuana," he said. "We didn't make any arrests, but we're not letting them get away with the dope."

Jenkins said he has a mountain of new information and leads to follow up on. Fortunately, the state legislature funded for two more years a grants program that supports the work of rural counties in fighting illegal drug production and trafficking.

If it weren't for state funding, Jenkins, who serves on a narcotics task force combining Walla Walla, Columbia and Garfield counties, wouldn't have a position specializing in the fight against drugs in the area.

2011 Pot Eradications

In Columbia County:

June 18: Cold Creek

2,000 plants; one arrest

July 26: Robinette Mountain

6,800 plants; no arrests

Aug. 17: Hartsock Grade

2,300 plants; two arrests

Aug. 18: Eckler Mountain

25,765 plants; no arrests

Total: 36,865 plants