Adventures in Farming

In my last post I referenced an experience that I had on a previous adventure in the Cleveland National Forest. Here is the complete story of said experience. My family has somewhat of a tradition of spending the 4th with my parents at their home. You see, my mom makes homemade ice cream every 4th of July and this alone is reason enough to make the hour long drive over the mountain. For some reason that I can not remember, this year was different. We stayed home on the 4th as did my sister and her family. However, there was no way we were going to miss out on homemade ice cream that we get but one time per year so we convinced my mom to make it a few days later and the family would come and celebrate a few days late. Well the night before, my kids, as well as my sisters kids had stayed the night at my parents house. I think we had a concert to go to or something. Since my sister and I would both be driving over the mountain, we took advantage of the babysitting and decided it would be a perfect time to get in a short hike while we did not have the kids. We were training to climb Mt. Whitney later in the summer and needed all the miles we could get. We decided to meet at the San Juan Loop trail head which is directly across the highway from the Ortega candy store. We headed down the trail all the way to the bottom of the canyon where I had the bright idea of trying to walk back up the canyon but via the dry creek bed instead of the trail. My wife and sister were both game so up we headed. From the creek we were not able to see the trail, but figured we would easily see the turnoff that would take us back to our waiting car. Boy were we wrong. We walked for what seemed like a good distance but figured it just seemed further due to the many obstacles we had to avoid. Eventually we came to a small pool that still had water and saw a shiny new Honda pump with a black hose attached to it leading up the creek. This is odd we thought, being a little naive, our first thought was that the rangers must be pumping the old stagnate water out of the creek to control the mosquitoes. This was a national forest. Boy were we wrong again. After following the black hose for a good distance we suddenly came across two men. One approached from behind us and one was coming down out of the brush way above the creek. Neither of the men spoke English, but luckily for us, my Spanish is decent enough to communicate. The men asked what we were doing and if we had seen any of the "plantas". At this point, I figured out real quick what was going on and tried to play dumb. I told the men that we were lost and asked where the highway was. At this point neither my wife or my sister knew what was going on. All of our communication had been in Spanish. The men told us to follow them and they would take us to the road. They them escorted us up the creek about 300 yards, one of them in front of us and one of them behind us. The guy who was leading was actually quite friendly and showed us where the poison oak was and where they had come across rattlesnakes. The man behind us was not nearly as friendly and was actually a little scary looking. We finally got to the base of a hill and one of the men handed me his cell phone and told me to speak with his "jefe" or boss. I spoke with this man on the phone in English. He proceeded to tell me that we were trespassing on his land and not to come back. I thought this was funny because it is a national forest, but of course I played right along. He even offered to trade us some "product" in exchange for us keeping quiet about what we had seen. I told him that would not be necessary and he sent us up the hill. At the top of the steep hill was the highway. At this point I explained to my wife and sister what was happening. The spot that we came out at was about 2 miles east of where we had parked, but we were just glad to be away from the farmers and headed back to the car.
In doing a little research and my sister talking with the sheriff department, we found out that marijuana farming is quite prevalent in wild areas. Please learn from our mistakes and be very careful when coming across things that strike you as odd when hiking. We were lucky, things could have turned out much worse. By the way, the ice cream later that day was awesome!