Polishrifleman
Member
Did anyone catch the "Battle for the National Parks" episode on Outdoor Life Network last night? It is set to air again on Feb. 2 late night/early morning.
It was a very informative but horrible show IMO. I really get frustrated when a show discusses a problem but not ideas on fixing them.
Evidently the "Mexican" drug cartels are having a tough time smuggling in dope since 9/11 so they set up camps in the National Parks for multi billion dollar grow operations.
It is the Park Rangers juristiction and they look like a seal team running around the parks. The growers steal water from nearby streams and run miles of irrigation hose around tilled and terraced hillsides under the canopy to prevent helicopter spotting, using natural sunlight, fertilizer, weed killer, and other unnatural agents to grow the crop.
What gets me is the fact that the "Investigators" kept harping on the guns they would find in the camps and how the Rangers must be outmanned and outgunned. Most of the Rangers played it down pretty well but one guy in particular when showing off the "evidence bunker" mentions the lone AK as a real killing machine. Are we supposed to be scared to go into our National playgrounds? One flyfisherman on the show won't go back after having a shotgun leveled to his chest when he stumbled onto an operation while out fishing.
I know the pot growing here in Washington has increased on public lands (one of the latest cases involved half wine casks in the top of old growth trees). Part of this is due to remoteness, and another is that the government already owns the land so there is no land to seize or lose.
Could this be a military operation? Does it fall under the guise of National Security like so many other things today? What would you do if out hunting, trapping, hiking, scouting, camping or whatever and you came across something like this?
It was a very informative but horrible show IMO. I really get frustrated when a show discusses a problem but not ideas on fixing them.
Evidently the "Mexican" drug cartels are having a tough time smuggling in dope since 9/11 so they set up camps in the National Parks for multi billion dollar grow operations.
It is the Park Rangers juristiction and they look like a seal team running around the parks. The growers steal water from nearby streams and run miles of irrigation hose around tilled and terraced hillsides under the canopy to prevent helicopter spotting, using natural sunlight, fertilizer, weed killer, and other unnatural agents to grow the crop.
What gets me is the fact that the "Investigators" kept harping on the guns they would find in the camps and how the Rangers must be outmanned and outgunned. Most of the Rangers played it down pretty well but one guy in particular when showing off the "evidence bunker" mentions the lone AK as a real killing machine. Are we supposed to be scared to go into our National playgrounds? One flyfisherman on the show won't go back after having a shotgun leveled to his chest when he stumbled onto an operation while out fishing.
I know the pot growing here in Washington has increased on public lands (one of the latest cases involved half wine casks in the top of old growth trees). Part of this is due to remoteness, and another is that the government already owns the land so there is no land to seize or lose.
Could this be a military operation? Does it fall under the guise of National Security like so many other things today? What would you do if out hunting, trapping, hiking, scouting, camping or whatever and you came across something like this?
