11,800 cannabis plants cut down above Crystal Springs Reservoir
California anti-drug officers destroyed an 11,800-plant cannabis garden on San Francisco watershed land above Crystal Springs Reservoir in September 2000, a county record they valued at $45 million. The growers fled before the helicopter raid, leaving a camp behind, and no arrests were reported.
🇺🇸 Crystal Springs watershed above Crystal Springs Reservoir, San Mateo County · California, United States
A Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) helicopter team dropped officers on a 150-foot line into a steep hillside garden about two miles west of the Pulgas Water Temple on Monday 18 September 2000, finding 11,800 female cannabis plants growing under madrone, manzanita and cedar cover.[1]The growers had fled into the woods, leaving breakfast tortillas cooking on a camp stove beside a two-storey tree house stocked with food, porn magazines and hundreds of empty beer cans.[1]
A dozen agents from the San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force joined CAMP in the four-day operation, which ended on Thursday 21 September and was announced as the biggest cannabis seizure in county history.[2]CAMP investigators put the crop’s street value at about $45 million, saying the growers had likely spent under $20,000 on irrigation pipe, seed, fertiliser and labour.[1]
A water district ranger had tipped off police in August after following black plastic irrigation pipe from a spring down to the edge of the field, and veteran CAMP officers estimated the garden had been producing for at least two or three years.[1]The land belongs to San Francisco’s watershed and is closed to the public, which spared the growers the hikers and hunters who expose grows in national forests.[1]
Case data
Every number and detail the sources state, with the sources that state it.
The Chronicle account reports more than 12,000 plants from the four-day operation while the Examiner details an 11,800-plant garden, and this report uses the 11,800 figure.
No arrests were reported in the opened sources.
No photograph of the garden or the eradication with a recoverable direct image address was found in the opened sources.
California's Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force seized or destroyed 55,308 pounds of illicit cannabis and eradicated 108,226 plants between July and September 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom's office said. The quarter's operations across nine counties led to 14 arrests, nine firearms and $29,215 in cash, and brought the state's nine-month total to more than $230 million in cannabis.
Arrested 14Plants destroyed 108,226Cannabis 25.0873 t
Humboldt County sheriff's deputies eradicated about 3,102 cannabis plants and destroyed about 36 pounds of processed cannabis at two unlicensed grows near Alderpoint and Garberville on 5 and 6 October 2026. No arrests were made and the cases were sent to the District Attorney for review.
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On 16 September 2026 U.S. Forest Service officers, Glenn County’s Major Crimes Task Force and a Forest Service helicopter team eradicated about 700 cannabis plants from an illegal grow in remote Mendocino National Forest. No arrests were reported.
