Be on my side,
I’ll be on your side, baby
There is no reason
for you to hide
My family has, as previously mentioned, a cattle ranch up Colorado way. It’s in the area Michener made known in his book Centennial, the plains and canyons east of the Rockies that was once protected by Bent’s Fort. Our land is just downriver from the old fort where we have about nine miles of the Arkansas River and extends south a ways from there. Although there’s a highway that cuts through it and a few farm to markets, much of it is remote, unfrequented and wild, probably fairly similar to when Kit Carson hunted there for game.
*
You take my hand,
I’ll take your hand
Together we may get away
This much madness
is too much sorrow
It’s impossible
to make it today.*
Got a call from a family member last night. Seems the foreman’s son was way over on the back side putting in some new cattle and decided to check on a couple of blinds in the thick Tamarack along the river, an area where we see the biggest Mule Deer bucks. He noticed something unusual deep in the brush, some horizontal branches on brush that doesn’t grow that way. Peering over the top of a loosely constructed fence he saw a 110’ x 60’ plot of cleared land. No one has our permission to be there or doing anything, but clearly they were. 525 coffee can sized holes were in the cleared soil and planted in them were 1750 marijuana plants. A small hothouse held more seedlings still. In each hole was also mouse bait, presumably to eat in lieu of tender, pricey vegetation, and a number of mouse carcasses littered the place. There was a hose buried so well underground that you could walk over it without ever knowing it that ran down to the river. There a car battery lay hidden, waiting to power a small pump. An extra pair of shoes, a new shovel and various brush clearing tools were scattered out of view as well.
Yeah, she could drag me
over the rainbow,
send me away
Down by the river
We (family) called the Sheriff and he got in touch with Bent Co. law enforcement and the DEA. Plants were pulled and the area cleaned up. I requested they leave some official crime scene tape and other indications it was the authorities and not us that shut the operation down. The Sheriff says with that number of plants the potential street value come June or July would be around 1.3 Mil. While that might put Dale “Mac” McKussic’s voice in my head, “Street value? Which street is that?”, it’s still not a paltry operation. The amount of effort, planning and knowledge employed here says someone really knows what they’re doing and, quite frankly, we’re a little uncomfortable to have had anything of ours targeted as a place for such an operation.
While I’d crossed paths with the stuff growing up, the suppy side and scale of this are nothing I want to see again. Go away and leave us and, more importantly, the land alone.
