Weekly Digest Article

State Parks Cannabis Watershed Protection Program Cleans Former Cannabis Grows at Robert Louis Stevenson State Park


Story from: Doug Johnson, Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Division

State Park’s Cannabis Watershed Protection Program (CWPP) has been working with both the California Air National Guard and Great Tree Tenders to help clean and restore Robert Louis Stevenson State Park. This month, about 1,620 pounds of trash and hazardous materials were removed from a handful of former cannabis cultivation sites within the park. While the sites have not been active for at least ten years, fertilizer bags, pesticide bottles, propane tanks and miles of Polyethylene irrigation tubing were still left behind.

“The materials and chemicals that are left out there, you know they can leach into the water. Animals get into it, almost everything I see has been chewed upon by animals. We have bears out here and I know our bears are getting into all this trash and pesticides,” said Bill Miller, Bay Area District Environmental Scientist. “Some of it is rodenticides which has secondary effects on some of the animals... The most important thing is to try and clean these things up.”

Over the past few weeks, thanks to funding from the 2019 Cannabis Tax Fund, teams were able to remove and dispose of most of the waste left behind at these historic grow sites.

State Park Peace Officers, archeologists and Environmental Scientists from the Bay Area District teamed up with members of the CWPP’s Special Enforcement Team, or SET, and Great Tree Tenders employees to consolidate the discarded materials, which included tents, tarps, food containers, pesticide containers, a car battery, and a half full 5-gallon propane tank. The trash was sorted on site into piles and then into large bags.

“We spent about three days on the ground with a crew of about 8 people, and the work on the ground consisted of hiking out to these sites, locating where the major trash sources are, consolidating it into these big garbage bags that we call super sacks and then pulling the miles of poly line that are out here. So, we cut the line and put it into piles where the helicopter can pick it up,” Miller says.

Due to their remote location, the material must be airlifted out by an Air National Guard Black Hawk helicopter, which operates as part of their Counter Drug Task Force.

“These sites don’t seem far when you look at it on a map, the furthest site is about a mile and a half to hike. But there are no trails to these sites, there’s no roads. And it’s all on steep terrain that requires hiking through the brush and under the trees on steep slopes with loose soil. So, to haul it out by hand would have been just a tremendous amount of work. The helicopter makes it much easier,” Miller said.

CWPP was established as an interdisciplinary program within State Parks after the passage of Proposition 64. CWPP crosses virtually all program areas in the department and includes a specialized team of state park peace officers who form the Special Enforcement Team (SET), numerous Natural Resources and Cultural Resources Divisions staff members who lead efforts at remediation and restoration, Facilities and Maintenance Division employees who tackle unique challenges at access and restoration efforts, and many other classifications who work to meet the challenges illegal cannabis cultivation presents for our State Park System.