INCURSIONS INTO PARADISE

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- In this majestic, sprawling
wilderness on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, hikers are
being warned about more than black bears and rattlesnakes. Now,
back-country visitors are being cautioned about armed guards, booby
traps, and trip wires that protect a skyrocketing increase of
marijuana cultivation on public land in California.

These illegal plantations, National Park Service officials say, are
the product of sophisticated Latin American drug organizations, which
have turned to remote sites in the West to avoid increased attention
to cross-border traffic since the Sept. 11 attacks. Several national
parks, including Yosemite, have discovered marijuana within their
boundaries, but few have been as heavily infiltrated as Sequoia.

"We are sort of the poster child for this," said William Tweed, chief
naturalist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. "We have
demonstrated very clearly that this is tied to international drug cartels."

Last month, officials from Tulare County, gateway to Sequoia, pleaded
with a House national parks subcommittee to create a $5.5 million
task force to fight marijuana cultivation on park land and lobbied
for the increased use of helicopters to find the fields.

The National Park Service has budgeted $764,000 to fight the drug
cultivation in its parks, which was discovered in 2001 and has been
increasing since.

Over the last three years, park officials in Sequoia have found 105
marijuana "gardens," most planted about 1 to 2 miles off public roads
in treacherous parts of the park. In 2004, rangers destroyed 44,000
plants in the park with a street value pegged at $176 million by
state narcotics officers. This year, 4,400 plants have been
discovered. In the last three years, 27 people were charged in
connection with the marijuana-growing operation in Sequoia alone.

About 10,000 plants were destroyed in Yosemite National Park last
year. An unusually wet spring held down production in the park this
year, park officials said, but 68,000 plants were confiscated from
national forestland just outside Yosemite.

The Park Service has also discovered marijuana-growing operations in
the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, a national
recreation area in Shasta County, and two in the San Francisco area:
Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore.

Tweed said it is unclear whether increased pressure has forced drug
workers to reduce plantings in Sequoia, to relocate into more rugged
parts of the Sequoia wilderness, or simply to move to other federal land.

So far, no violent confrontations between rangers or other law
enforcement and marijuana growers have been recorded at Sequoia. But
in September, in Santa Clara County, a state fish and game warden was
shot in both legs in an exchange of gunfire that killed a suspect in
a raid on a large marijuana garden. And in 2003, four suspects were
killed in raids on California drug plantations, said Val Jimenez,
special agent in charge of the Fresno office of the state's Bureau of
Narcotics Enforcement.

Rangers say they were stunned when the marijuana camps -- already
harvested -- were discovered in 2001 in Sequoia, which was founded in
1890 as the country's second national park and was visited by 1.5
million people in 2004.

Elaborate terraced gardens had been planted and harvested, miles of
irrigation tubing installed, sleeping and cooking areas designated,
huge trash pits dug, and even small altars built for religious
services for the men assigned to each site, according to Athena
Demetry, a restoration ecologist at Sequoia. Dozens of propane
canisters and hundreds of pounds of ecologically damaging herbicides
and pesticides were left behind.

At every location, ammunition was discovered, said Bob Wilson, a law
enforcement officer for the park. Firearms had been discarded at many
sites. State drug agents and federal rangers found AK-47s,
semiautomatic handguns, revolvers, and a firearm attached to a trip
wire to protect one garden.

At Sequoia, camouflaged rangers now receive military-style training
in which they simulate firefights with an unseen enemy in dense,
wilderness terrain. "There are evolving tactics on both sides," Tweed
said. "This issue of people coming in and stealing our land and
threatening us with guns is not something we anticipated."

Safety concerns at Sequoia have become so acute that Wilson said he
routinely tells visitors to avoid the park's foothills, an area of
100,000 acres, where brown, thick brushland offers ideal terrain for
marijuana planting. If visitors venture off the foothill trails,
Wilson said, "there's a chance that someone will be seriously harmed,
or worse."

Each year, in February, workers sneak into parks like Sequoia and
Yosemite to take advantage of the March-to-November growing season.
Many are undocumented immigrants who were unaware of the job for
which they were recruited, law enforcement officials said.

The creation and supply of the camps is made easier, park officials
said, because the guards and the gardeners do not stand out in the
agricultural mecca of the long, broad San Joaquin Valley, which
borders Sequoia National Park to the west. In the valley approaches,
where vast farms and migrant workers are plentiful, the sight of a
truck hauling large quantities of pesticides, irrigation tubing, and
any of the other materials needed at the marijuana sites does not
automatically raise suspicions.

"Basically, these are poor, desperate, illegal immigrants trying to
take money home to Mexico or Guatemala," Tweed said of the workers
who spend weeks, maybe months, living at the sites.

Park officials said evidence indicates the supply work usually has
been done at night, often via roadside drops at the head of a
well-disguised trail that leads down steep slopes to the marijuana
gardens. In remote areas of the park, where neither the public nor
rangers might notice, such brazen work nearly always went undetected.
Now, a gate has been installed at one of the roads most often used by
marijuana growers.

A simple addition such as the gate, and the systematic dismantling of
discovered camps, appear to be making a difference. But no one at the
park is claiming victory.

"We are guardedly optimistic we may have made some progress," Tweed said.

The danger to typical Sequoia visitors, few of whom would hike near
marijuana sites infested with rattlesnakes and poison oak, is small,
Tweed said. However, he stressed that the peril for staff is
significant. "If we're not careful," he said, "we're going to get a
ranger shot."

Jimenez said the problem of illegal marijuana growth in California
has exploded in the last three years. In 2003, a special unit created
by the state attorney general's office seized 461,000 plants
statewide, Jimenez said. In 2004, the figure was 621,000. And so far
this year, the total has soared to 1.1 million. At an estimated value
of $4,000 per plant, Jimenez said, the financial stakes are enormous
for drug organizations, based primarily in Mexico, that bring
businesslike precision to a system of hiring, supplying their
workers, and retrieving the marijuana from hard-to-reach areas of public land.

The marijuana is shipped around the nation by the drug organizations
using existing distribution channels in the United States, Jimenez
said. "They're very dangerous," he added.

Laura Whitehouse, a Fresno-based program manager for the National
Parks Conservation Association, appealed in Nov. 17 testimony before
Congress for more money to eradicate marijuana cultivation in the
parks. Instead of worrying about black bears, most of which are
docile, families hiking through Sequoia are threatened with a more
dangerous menace, she told the House Subcommittee on National Parks.

"We should do everything in our power to get these guys out of our
parks," Whitehouse said in an interview. "For me, this is the number
one issue. How can we have armed drug cartels with AK-47s in a
national park? This is a place where I take my three children."

She estimated that $1.5 million to $2 million for at least two years
is needed at a park where rangers are being diverted from traditional
public duties such as interpretation for visitors.

Tweed insisted that the park has maintained its educational
programming, but he acknowledged the anti-marijuana effort has
created unexpected strains.

Tweed laments the cultivation's toll on the park's mission to
preserve pristine wilderness for future generations. He also is
thinking about protecting Sequoia's employees and visitors. "The
potential is what scares me," he said.