Jeffco pot-farm busts reflect growing trend

Helicopter hauls bundles of pot from state land in Jeffco. (Photo courtesy Jeffco Sheriff's Office)

JEFFERSON COUNTY – This week’s discovery of another impromptu marijuana farm at Golden Gate Canyon State Park and three other pot plots found on open public land this summer represents a new and troubling trend, according to the Jeffco Sheriff’s Office.

Hunters at the park northwest of Golden Saturday stumbled onto what turned out to be about 1,000 mature pot plants worth an estimated half-million dollars, according to Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Jacki Kelley.

It took hours for law enforcement and Division of Wildlife employees top remove the marijuana from the steep, rugged area where it was growing. A Colorado Air National Guard helicopter was enlisted to lift bundles of the pot from the site.

The operation is not believed to be connected to three other pot-growing operations found in the Pike National Forest in Jeffco earlier this year, Kelley said. The previous three cases, however, do involve what Kelley called “similarities.”

Two people have been arrested in connection with one of the cases, a marijuana farm found near Deckers in the Gun Barrel Creek area of the Pike National Forest in late August. The suspects were caught as they tended an estimated 14,500 pot plants, according to a Drug Enforcement Agency spokesman. Another seven to 10 suspects fled as members DEA’s Front Range Task Force raided the grow site, which is believed to be the largest outdoor marijuana farm ever found in Colorado.

The DEA spokesman said the two suspects are migrant workers from Mexico recruited from outside the state and that the field is part of a move by drug traffickers to grow marijuana inside the U.S. instead of smuggling it across the borders where anti-smuggling pressure has increased.

Kelley said that move northward into Colorado has the Sheriff’s Office and the West Metro Drug Task Force concerned.

In the past, Jeffco deputies usually found grow sites on private property or inside houses, sometimes vacant and abandoned houses. But this summer’s series of pot-farm busts on public lands is a new twist here, Kelley said.

“I think, based on what we’re hearing, this is not going away. We will be faced with many more of these activities,” Kelley said.

Because the illicit growing operations have moved north from the border areas, law enforcement agencies are pooling their expertise and consulting with similar agencies in the areas that have sent the growers packing.

“ This is not something we think is going to affect Jeffco just this one year,” Kelley said. “We are working with the West Metro Drug Task Force, other drug task forces in the metro area, the DEA and others to try and educate each other and determine how we want to want to manage this situation in the spring when the suspects come out here into our woods and forests to plant.”

Kelley concedes that monitoring hundreds of square miles of public land in Jeffco’s high country is a “very tall order,” but said authorities are determined to “get better at locating them, at eradicating them and diverting them.”

The greatest concern, Kelley said, is that all four Jeffco growing sites were discovered inadvertently when ranchers, hikers, hunters or others just happened to see them

“Our concern is for their safety, stumbling into to these without knowledge of what they are potentially facing” when they encounter the illegal growers, Kelley said.

All the sites raided in Jeffco this summer included shelters – a tent or a hastily assembled shanty – obviously used by people tending the plants.

Anyone with information on any of the cases or other possible pot growing sites should call the Jeffco Sheriff’s Office Tip-line, (303) 271-5612.