Word: forest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...blue-gray dawn tickles the tops of the ponderosa pines at the Sugar Pine Recreation Area in California's Tahoe National Forest. Campers slumber in lakeside tents; bikers have yet to hit the trails. But all is not quiet on this cool July morning. A platoon of camouflaged figures equipped with rifles, pistols and bulletproof vests creep through manzanita brush with a police dog. Their objective: a marijuana plantation a few hundred yards from a well-traveled tourist area...
...Forest Service rangers stealthily approach, an unsuspecting Mexican laborer named Pedro Villa Garcia, 51, stands in a clearing. All around him the hillside is freshly terraced, irrigated by black plastic hoses and dotted with iridescent green cannabis. Villa Garcia peers down the path. Is that a black bear--a common local species--emerging from the morning mist? Suddenly he sees the rangers and dashes off through the brambles. But the police dog, a Belgian Malinois, catches up quickly, sinking its teeth into Villa Garcia's arm. Two rangers wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. "We're good...
Armed combat is hardly what families hope to encounter as they head for their summer vacations in America's national parks and forests. But drug smugglers, methamphetamine cooks and cannabis cultivators are invading federal lands as never before. A U.S. Park Service ranger in Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned down by a Mexican pot smuggler last August. In Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, 192 meth labs have been dismantled over the past three years. And marijuana farms are infesting Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest and Alabama's Talladega National Forest...
Villa Garcia is unarmed when he is caught in the Tahoe forest--probably, rangers say, because it is early in the season. If they had already matured, the 3,500 plants he was tending would have yielded some $8 million worth of pot--an investment worth protecting. In the fall, when scores of Mexican workers arrive to harvest and process the pot, shoot-outs occur between law-enforcement agents and camouflage-clad growers toting AK-47s. Sometimes the pot pirates mistake innocent tourists for thieves or cops. Last year kayakers on the Salmon River in the Klamath National Forest were...
...nine members of the Magana clan pleaded guilty in federal court to narcotics charges and were given prison sentences ranging from four to 12 years. The Maganas have been tied to 20 large gardens with more than 100,000 plants in the Sequoia, Sierra, Stanislaus and Mendocino national forests. They also supplied workers for pot farms on federal land in Arkansas, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington. According to investigators, the Maganas and other groups have used profits from methamphetamine operations to expand into marijuana. They own gas stations, haciendas and million-dollar resorts in Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara, Michoacan and other...