ENTIAT – Wary eyes search for rattlesnakes in the desert grasses covering the dry hills. The scorched remains of pine trees from an old wildfire loom overhead. Then, hidden beneath a thicket of brush, bright green plants stand out.
In terraced dirt, nurtured by an elaborate irrigation system, 465 marijuana plants are tucked away, obscured by the winding branches of vine maple and brush.
It’s a remote area of north central Washington’s Wenatchee National Forest bordering the Entiat Wildlife Refuge to the south and an apple orchard to the east.
It’s also a small plot. Law enforcement officials have seized thousands of plants in the state in recent months, forcing them to abandon their ongoing battle against methamphetamine for days at a time. Some blame the post-Sept. 11 border crackdown that slowed the flow of marijuana from western Canada. Others say increasing enforcement efforts in California and Oregon are pushing pot production by Mexican nationals north.
Regardless, the gardens, as those who hunt the plants call them, are proliferating in counties where huge tracts of open space stretch law enforcement resources thin.
Chelan County, home to the largest number of busts this year with about 35,000 plants confiscated, covers nearly 3,000 square miles – 80 percent of it forested federal land.
“This is reality. A marijuana plant averages about 6 feet tall in its maturity. We’re not going to be able to find it all,” said Mike Harum, Chelan County sheriff.
“We’ve done as much as we can financially – our staff and our helicopters – to do the best we can. We need help from the federal government, state government.”
Federal officials have recognized the increase in activity. The U.S. Department of Justice noted in July that Mexican drug traffickers were expanding their areas of operation, with continued growth expected in isolated areas of Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
In particular, federal officials warned local police that central Washington’s I-90 corridor on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains was a growing drug route.
The numbers bear that out. In 2004, law enforcement officials confiscated a record 133,936 marijuana plants, pushing the state to No. 5 nationally in the number of domestic plants seized. The largest, a field of more than 60,000 plants on the Yakama Indian Reservation, was traced to organized crime in Mexico. Valued at more than $35 million, the grow remains one of the largest busts in the nation.
So far this year, police have confiscated more than 82,000 plants entering the fall season, when wandering hikers and hunters are likely to stumble onto the fields and report them to police.
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