Trimming Season: An Elegy for the Heyday of California’s Emerald Triangle

An estimated 15,000 illicit farms once operated behind the Redwood Curtain, with a pound of weed selling for upwards of $8,000.

My friend was bound together with the other trimmers on the floor of the barn, and left there half-naked without food, water, or toilet…

Out here, this green earth will swallow anything whole. Consider a felled coastal redwood, one of the largest and heartiest living organisms on earth, breaking down into the dank forest duff and disappearing into the understory. The desert tells time in dust, water through shape. The forest expresses itself in rot.

On my way to Willow Creek, a marijuana nirvana in the mountains above Arcata, I drive past forgotten properties tucked into the darkness of trees. They’re littered with broken-down cars and RVs, abandoned doublewides and graffitied trailers — the collective detritus of old pot farms slowly sinking into the earth. Discarded fuel cans, box fans, grow lights, the skeletal remains of retired PVC greenhouses and five-gallon buckets. Dappled sunlight interrogates the roadside debris.

And these old farms are just the ones I can see from the road. But don’t worry, the rest are being viewed from above, by the ever-present law-enforcement helicopters and drones. They used to pepper these hillsides by the hundreds, these quaint, herbal hamlets. But that was before legalization and its slew of regulations.

This part of Humboldt County is a two-hour drive down the coast from the Oregon border; too north for “California,” too south for the Pacific Northwest, estranged enough to have spiritually seceded, alongside parts of southern Oregon, into its own territory dubbed the State of Jefferson. It’s a region scarred by a long economic history of boom and bust. For a quick stint in the mid-1800s, the California Gold Rush brought thousands of prospectors who spread news of the abundant, durable, insect-resistant lumber of Sequoia sempervirens, or the coastal redwood. When commercial logging started in the 1860s, it took loggers up to a week to fell just one tree with a handsaw. Some of these trees boasted diameters of up to 30 feet.

By the end of the 1960s, with the later help of chainsaws and bulldozers and junk bond investors and corporate raiders, 95 percent of the 1.9 million acres of old-growth redwood forests in the region had been logged. So enterprising West Coasters found another tree to harvest, this one being an annual crop that’s cultivatable at scale: Mary Jane.

During the Summer of Love, Humboldt properties were selling for a few hundred dollars an acre and back-to-the-landers arrived en masse to escape the drudge of polite society and the soon-to-be burnt-out Haight-Ashbury scene. Turns out that hippies love weed, so they cultivated marijuana in their vegetable gardens, which were protected by the space and privacy granted by the remaining coastal redwoods. Fortunately for the hippies, a lot of other people love weed too, and these Humboldt homesteaders made enough money with their cannabis crops to fund local schools, clinics, radio stations, fire departments, and community centers. Money did grow on trees, for a time, in abundance.

After spending most of the 1960s formulating utopian ideals over joint rotations, these hippies finally had the land and the capital to realize their visions, transforming Humboldt from the final frontier of the Wild West to a bastion of DIY freedom. These communities grew and prospered via mutual aid in an otherwise lawless place; the dejected old logging towns became cultural hubs of isolated yet communal living.

And weed was the heart of the Emerald Triangle — the Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino counties of remote Northern California — spurring the Green Rush. As word spread throughout the years, people from all over the world took to the hills to bank in, including Chinese, Bulgarian, Russian, and Mexican cartels. At its peak, the “redwood curtain” made it possible for an estimated 15,000 illicit farms to operate in the region’s mountainous, forested expanse. A single farm could grow hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of weed, each pound selling upwards of $8,000 during its peak in the mid-90s and $3,000 in the aughts. Hundreds of millions of dollars breezed through Humboldt each year, in cash, to then be locked in safes or buried deep in the forest. Such was life in the Klamath Mountains, and everyone wanted a slice.

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In the early 2010s, not yet old enough to drink, I’d catch a Greyhound up Highway 101 to work on these farms during the twilight of the Green Rush. It was a part of alternative life on the West Coast: Young seasonal workers “trimmed” the flowers into presentable buds for smoking, after the great dopamine trees had first been chopped down and bucked into workable form during harvest. I’d stare out the bus window and watch the golden hills of the Central Coast roll into the oaks and madrones of the Bay Area, until they gave way to the thick Humboldt redwoods. Growing up in San Diego, it was as far and as different as I could get from home while remaining in the same state — a whole 14-hour drive north.

The growing season for marijuana begins around March, when farmers plant their first starts. They then nurture the plants until harvest in October and November, when trimming picks up in earnest. Back in the day, trimming work was so abundant in these Northern California mountain towns you could pick it up off the street most anytime during the fall, and so I’d make my Greyhound pilgrimage each autumn, with a dozen other dirtbags looking to earn some under-the-table cheddar. They’d pile out in Ukiah, Willits, Laytonville, Garberville, Rio Dell, Eureka, or Arcata to sit around with their backpacks at the gas station, waiting to get picked up, sleeping in the forest until work landed. It was the perfect way to fund a life without commitments. Growing up in the suburbs, it felt to me like the freedom of some forgotten past.

I’d hop off the bus in any one of these towns, depending on where my farm was that season, and a friend of a friend of a friend would pick me up and drive me some hours up a dirt road into the hills, through a series of locked gates, beyond which I would camp out, work long hours, and party with a bunch of other nomadic twenty-somethings and fellow trimmigrants from all over the world.

Those days, before legalization, you’d make $300 for each pound of pot you could trim, paid in cash at the end of your tour of duty. If you were fast and the buds were dense, you could trim a few pounds each day while sitting in a redwood forest beside a sparkling blue river, listening to a combination of audio books, folk music, and the lovingly elaborated conspiracy theories of the other trimmers. After a couple weeks, you’d ride off the mountain with thousands of dollars in a wad of small bills, a big bag of weed, a few new friends, maybe a lover or two, and carry on with your life.

For those who grew up in Humboldt, weed was the lifeblood keeping their families and their neighbors afloat. My close friends from Arcata, a two-stoplight town on the Humboldt coastline, recall the children of local weed barons driving Cadillacs to high school, counting out their hundreds in class, and throwing parties at their grow mansions in the hills. This wealth didn’t express itself in the way that I was used to — SoCal’s privileged youth flaunting cocaine, convertibles, and backyard swimming pools with waterslides. While Humboldt’s pot growers were profiting to the tune of millions of dollars each year, it was often by wearing steel toes and Carhartt suspenders, driving F-250s, playing the mandolin, raising goats, and living in the boonies.

Humboldt was single-handedly getting most of the nation stoned; people got rich, communities were built. But the country folk didn’t care much for frills. Things were just fine as long as you were sheltered from the violence and exploitation that was an invariable byproduct of the trade. In the local mountain bar down the road from any one of these farms, we’d hear of busts on human trafficking, sexual abuse, and the occasional murder. Per capita, Humboldt has the highest missing person rate in the state, earning itself the nickname “the black hole,” and a well-known area near the Mendocino border which earned the title of “murder mountain.”

The darkness always felt far enough away from where I sat at the trimming table. Still, depending on your corner of the mountain range, you’d wake up to the “morning warnings” — a conversation in automatic gunfire echoing through the valleys. A daily don’t fuck with us, something I came to respect as warranted.

It wasn’t uncommon for the cartels to raid profitable farms toward the end of trimming season, once the labor was complete and the product was ready for market. Such was the fate of my hippy friend’s farm in 2014:

A Mexican cartel rammed through their locked gates in a surge of SUVs before dawn; stripped and hog-tied everyone at gunpoint; shot the guard dogs; stole all the trimmed buds, guns, and money they could find; and left all the farm laborers zip-tied together, alive — deliberate in their decision not to kill anyone so as not to draw unnecessary attention to the heist. My friend was left there, bound together with the other trimmers on the floor of the barn, half-naked, without food or water or toilet, for two whole days before another friend rolled up and discovered them all cuddled together for warmth. Hence, the morning warnings.

Some seasons later I was trimming on a farm in Petrolia — a place so isolated that the Church of Scientology elected it as the home of an underground vault, secured by guards and fortified to endure any direct hit short of a nuclear bomb, to safeguard the writings and recordings of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. But that’s a story for another day. The grower opened his safe one afternoon to find $50,000 in cash was missing; in its place was a single blue latex glove, the same kind trimmers often wear to avoid covering their hands in the bud’s sticky residue. For days, everyone on the farm was intensely questioned, if not accused. None of us were permitted to leave until he completed his interrogations. The grower never found out who did it; I cashed out and left that week, deciding finally that my time would be better spent on a strawberry farm.

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Proposition 64 was a voter initiative to legalize weed in California, and it passed in November of 2016 with 57 percent support. Legalizing recreational sensimilla appealed to stoners and squares alike: removing the risk of the fuzz impinging on their buzz, while taxing revenues to fund public services. People loved the idea of shorter prison sentences for marijuana-related charges, new environmental protections, and the right to get stoned out of their gourds without fear of arrest. Prop 64’s biggest backer was billionaire Sean Parker, founder of Napster and Facebook’s first president, who ultimately contributed $8.9 million dollars to the campaign. Serving as its spokesperson was Jason Kinney, a man famously known for eating that scandalous dinner with Gavin Newsom — for whom he is a longtime friend, confidante, and adviser — at the beginning of COVID in Napa’s opulent French Laundry, and for being the head of Sacramento’s largest lobbying firm.

Farmers were skeptical of these bigwig intentions brewing in the state capitol, but were promised an honorarium if they came out into the open with their growing operations and became compliant with the new legislation; the carrot being a five-year head start to continue growing their weed at scale, legally, before corporate cultivation invariably came in to gobble them up. We’ll go out with a bang, they thought, and public support was handily rallied. In December of 2017, a month before the law was meant to take effect, the smaller farmers were betrayed when the state lifted the one-acre cap that was supposed to limit corporate growers for the first five years.

What followed was practically unlimited cultivation by big companies who took advantage of the industry these legacy farmers had built and profited from for decades. The selling price of a pound of pot plummeted from $3,000 to just $200 in a single growing season, collapsing the regional economy in the snap of a bong rip. The small farmers who came into compliance and invested their life savings in legal pot were met with a complete market collapse — and stuck paying up to $30,000 a year in trimming licenses, distribution licenses, transportation licenses, lawyers, consultants, compliance land modivications… and often penalized 50 percent of the licensing cost if they were late to pay by a single day. That was in addition to the tens of thousands of dollars that now needed to be spent each year on permitting, environmental impact statements, and state taxes.

By 2021, there were just 975 independently owned legal grow operations surviving in Humboldt. Today, that number has dropped to about 600. While traditional outdoor farmers with a few acres to their name had shelled out their savings to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act, big corporate indoor grows were popping up all over Southern California, spanning hundreds of acres, and relying on massive amounts of energy to power the fans, lights, and watering systems that kept their plants blooming, agnostic of the seasons.

Whatever people had voted for, they had been served up yet another example of corporate America snuffing small businesses and sucking the soul out of a product rooted in counterculture. It had only been a matter of time, but nobody could have anticipated the fallout of it all. Along that old Greyhound route, the main strips of those mountain towns are gutted, their storefronts boarded up and abandoned once more.

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Dave and Lorelei’s farm in Willow Creek is one of the remaining legal farms cultivating cannabis in Humboldt County. They’re distinct, in that they’ve been growing legally since the late 90s under Proposition 215 (allowing the cultivation and use of medical marijuana in California, a whole other can of worms). The Prop 64 transition wasn’t as brutal for them as it was for others, though I know it hurt them too.

If we’ve learned anything, it’s that the redwood forest is a great place to hide. As such, it is also the chosen territory of the elusive Bigfoot. Willow Creek (“Bigfoot Capital of the World”) sits along the Trinity River and is the proud home of a Bigfoot museum, where one can find an impressive collection of large cast footprints.

(County Highway)