Big Outdoor Marijunana Grow Raided on PALCO Land

The first major outdoor marijuana grow of the season to be discovered and destroyed by the Humboldt County Drug Task Force was found on land owned by Pacific Lumber Company yesterday just east of Bridgeville, the town that has been bought and sold multiple times since its 2002 auction debut on eBay.

The Sheriff's Office press release says that there were 10,068 pot plants ranging from three to six inches in height protected by an electric deer fence and being kept alive with an automated watering system. Nobody was at the grow site when law enforcement officers arrived, but they are investigating the case and "evidence was collected" from the scene.

With the plants being so small, the Drug Task Force must have discovered this outdoor growing site just days after it was actually planted. Outdoor plants that are in the ground by this time of the year can grow to be three or more feet tall before flowering out, which makes us wonder if Sheriff's deputies showed up on the heels of the growers hightailing it out of there.

As is usually the case with grows of this size, "foreign drug trafficking organizations" are being blamed, and Sheriff Gary Philp warns the public that this type of outdoor pot farm can be extremely dangerous for people hiking or wandering around in the woods due to the very high value of an operation this large, and that in the event that you come across something like this, you should immediately leave and contact law enforcement.

We do wonder how many of these big outdoor grow ops are actually being organized and maintained by "foreign drug traffickers" instead of local Humboldt growers. The cops rarely find foreign nationals at grow sites, and we're having trouble recalling even a single report of Mexican gardeners being arrested at the scene of any outdoor growing operation. Perhaps our memory is shortsighted, but seriously, we're betting this is the work of true locals.

Remember this story? It refers to the well known fact that regular old Americans have been growing pot outdoors in Humboldt County for decades, and that all those buried 55 gallon drums full of cash in the hills belong to white growers, not Mexican gangsters. Or are we missing something?