Pablo’s Folly: The High Lifter Pump

Wasting time, money, and energy on The Marijuana Highway…

(What's done is done and all I can do is look back with regret but that's not helpful so it's time to just move on but before I do I'll tell you this tale about a guy without a life except for fervently sucking on the green nipple, chasing the Yanqui dollar. I was out-of-control, unstoppable, and a wife, girlfriend, or just a good friend would have been helpful to advise me to curb my growing obsession because I started developing pot patches which were difficult to access, not very sunny, and all that time and effort got raided by CAMP anyway.)

The High Lifter was a very interesting and innovative pump, invented by a guy down in Willits, which used no fuel or electricity, just the force of water coming down the hill to pump water hundreds of feet up the mountain. There were two settings: the four to one and the nine to one. The four to one pumped four times as high as the drop so if it was a fifty foot drop it pumped up 200 feet. The nine to one pumped up nine times higher than the drop, so if the drop was the same fifty feet drop it pumped up 450 feet. The four to one delivered approximately twice as much as the nine to one. (Only a fourth of the water going through the four to one and just a ninth of the water used by the nine to one went up the mountain so it was best used in a situation where there was plenty of water.)

When I ran out of places to grow weed on one side of the Gulch I expanded across the creek to the other, a mistake which rivaled the time in the early eighties when I traded a quarter pound of weed to Doug Chatard for a quarter ounce of Peruvian flake cocaine. I hiked around on the other side until I found some semi-level spots on the hillside for growing, then found a strong spring, almost a creek, and planned the water system to pump up the hill to the worthless patches using the High Lifter.

I made a wooden six by six inch spring box with one by fours, drilled a 3/4^th inch hole near the bottom, screwed in a 3/4^th inch adapter, and stapled window screen on either side to filter the silt and fine rock. I hiked fifteen minutes to the site and attached a six foot length of 3/4^th inch poly pipe to the adapter at the bottom. 

I found the highest spot up the spring with plenty of water, dug out a place for the spring box with a pickaxe (the tool which made Humboldt famous), placed the spring box in the watercourse, put a couple big rocks on top to keep it in place then checked to make sure the water was running more or less cleanly out of the end of the short length of  black pipe. 

Back home I cut a pickle barrel in half with a Sawsall, drilled a hole in the side near the top, screwed in a 3/4^th inch adapter, then covered the top with doubled mosquito netting upon which I screwed back on the pickle barrel rim to hold the netting tightly in place. (The High Lifter pump was very sensitive to silt and dirt so every measure needed to be taken to have clean water coming into it.) 

I pick-axed a small flat spot for the pickle barrel a couple vertical feet below the spring box, installed it there, and then put the hose from the spring box on top of the mosquito netting, and placed a heavy flat rock on it to keep it in place as the barrel was being filled. When it was full after a few minutes and overflowing cleanly out of the top adapter I pulled the black plastic poly hose up the hill from the pump site and connected it to the water flowing out.

The water ran down the hill and I connected it to a ten foot green garden hose remnant, installed a turn-off valve at the end, then connected it to an inline filter then the sophisticated Israeli filter which functioned as another turn-off valve. 

I rolled a few hundred feet of poly pipe out on the road below the house and dragged the whole length down the hillside, then up the other side to the big tank site. Over the years I had learned it was just foolish to unroll the black poly rolls through the brushy hillside, though I did that a few times before I started unrolling it on a level surface then pulling it downhill, an easy endeavor through any terrain, as long as there was no clamp holding two or more segments of hose which could get caught up in bushes and stuck. 

I opened the valve to the pump and did a test run: up the hill the water went, twenty-four hours a day, even just a quart a minute added up to a few hundred gallons after a couple days, plenty to water twenty to thirty plants.

I hauled six foot long fir one by sixes and rebar to make little terraces for each plant but how was I going to haul a ton of potting soil, chicken shit, and bonemeal a few hundred feet down the mountain then up the other side another couple hundred feet? I decided to throw it.

You can't just throw bags of dirt and fertilizers down a mountainside, the bags would break on the first or second toss so I bought a couple hundred poly feed bags from Neilson feeds, first used ones and then, what the hell, new ones. I put a bag of soil or amendments in each woven polyethylene bag, tied them shut with twine, loaded about thirty at a time into my Dodge pickup, and drove down the road below my cabin to the drop-off points along the trails I had made when setting up the water system.

I threw the bags down the hill where they generally clumped together although some  jumped the pile and tumbled further down the hill. It took three or four tosses to get them all the way down to the bottom, then one mighty heave across ever-churning Whale Creek.

I did the first loads myself and then hired a group of local teenagers to work for ten dollars an hour. There was this row of kids talking, laughing, and making bank, with each carrying one bag of shit or soil up the hill to the stupid patches. (They were the same ones who had trimmed for me some years earlier who I took to Mexico after the work was done.)

For some inane reason I decided to haul a huge heavy 1500 gallon tank down that hill, across the creek, then up the hill a couple hundred feet. Me and my young crew used a come-along to lower it down the mountain then we pushed it up a few hundred feet to the top.

When the two foot tall plants were sexed and ready I hauled a truckload of the females growing in three-gallon pots to the drop-off point, off-loaded them onto the road, hid them in the woods just below the top of the trailhead, drove the truck back up to the house, walked back down and started hauling them two at a time down the mountain to the bottom, then over the creek and up to their marginal summer home on the mountainside. 

Every few days I hiked out to water, unscrewed the bottom half of the fancy Israeli filter, and flushed out the row of filter rings inside. The High Lifter worked well all summer as I watered from the big tank high above the plants. 

It was quite a sight when CAMP came for the plants at the end of the season and hauled the tank away in a helicopter: it looked like a butt plug or tampon for a blue whale as it dangled in the sky below the chopper. We were monitoring the radio and the cops kept calling my trails linking all the pot patches The Marijuana Highway. 

They got it all.