On a hot August morning, Mourad Gabriel steps out of his pickup onto the gravel road that winds up the side of Rattlesnake Peak. Dark-bearded and muscular, the research ecologist sports a uniform of blue work clothes, sturdy boots and a floppy, Army-style camo hat. He straps on a pistol. “Just to let you know,” Gabriel says, sensitive to the impression the gun makes, “it’s public land, so I open-carry.”
Another 100-degree day is promised. Gabriel and his four field assistants are headed to work in California’s Plumas National Forest, a few hours’ drive from Lake Tahoe, at the northern terminus of the Sierra Nevada. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has enlisted Gabriel to assess the scars from rampant marijuana cultivation. Today’s field site: an illegal marijuana plantation known as the Rattlesnake Grow.
Gabriel doesn’t take chances because he’s been threatened personally. In 2014, someone poisoned his family dog with a pesticide that’s used at the grow sites. The intruder crept onto Gabriel’s property at night and scattered poisoned meat in his backyard. And last year during raids on plots elsewhere in California, two police dogs were stabbed by men fleeing the scene.
So whenever Gabriel enters a cultivation site with his research team — even one that’s been abandoned, as this one is — he always goes in first.
