THE PATRON SAINT OF MOTHER NATURE
There’s a huge misconception that game wardens are nothing more than glorified park rangers. Spend a few minutes talking to Lt. John Nores, and you’ll quickly realize nothing could be further from the truth. During his service with California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), he was on the front lines of illegal grow sites embedded in our national parks and forests that not only seek to avoid government regulation, but do so at the cost of our precious resources. Stream diversions, highly toxic banned pesticides, and anti-personnel boobytraps were just a smattering of the devastation Nores encountered during his 28-year tenure.
When people think of California’s illegal marijuana trade, images might come to mind of the recent series Murder Mountain or cops serving a warrant at some tract home rigged up with a greenhouse hidden in a garage — but there’s a much larger war going on that’s hidden in plain sight and rapidly escalating. The environmental impact and danger to nearby residents gets little, if any, mass media coverage. On August 5, 2005, Nores and his colleagues came under fire while preparing to raid an illegal marijuana grow operation in the densely wooded hills of California’s prestigious Silicon Valley. Nores’ partner sustained life-threatening injuries after taking a bullet through both legs from a cartel member’s AK-47.
Although the 2005 bust netted a large seizure of drugs and his partner survived, it gave everyone involved just an inkling of the cartel’s willingness to engage in violence and ecological degradation to make a few bucks. It also led to a recalibration of how to handle this ongoing problem, with the formation of the CDFW’s first dedicated Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) aimed at targeting trespass grow sites throughout the west. After Nores shared his firsthand knowledge of this conflict with us, we walked away with a sobering realization that it’s not happening in some far-off land. It’s entrenched in locations only miles from major cities, where average citizens may inadvertently stumble upon a drug trafficking operation that could cost them their lives.
RECOIL OFFGRID: What made you want to go to work for California Department of Fish and Wildlife?
John Nores: It really started with my grandfather’s influence. He was a Navy diesel mechanic and engineer on one of the cruisers in Pearl Harbor and survived that. Before he deployed, he and his high school buddies discovered Montana, and it blew their mind. When he got out of the service, he bought some property up there to make it a homestead for the family and anyone else who wanted to come. My dad, who has since passed away, got that whole service mentality, conservation, hunting, and shooting from him; really all my aunts and uncles did, and that trickled down through the generations. I was shooting trap and skeet at 9 years old; I passed the hunter’s safety course at 9 with dad’s help. My dad was a champion trap and skeet shooter and hunted everything from waterfowl to big game, so he was my hero.
I grew up in a rural part of south Silicon Valley in a little town called San Martin. When I was in college at San Jose State University in 1986, I wasn’t really feeling passionate about the civil engineering courses I was pursuing, but on winter break that first semester, my childhood friend and I took a pack horse and went on a 75-mile loop through Henry Coe State Park, which is 105,000 acres of epic wildlands. We took
