“There’s no other color like it: emerald green,” Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Kurt Smallcomb said, echoing at once the moniker given to the area that includes Mendocino, Trinity and Humboldt counties: the Emerald Triangle, and the reason Mendocino County has hosted the school for at least the last six years.
Black helicopters and large, fixed-wing airplanes could be seen in the skies throughout the county Monday through Friday. About 40 students spent their mornings in a classroom and their afternoons in the field, flying over forests, public and recreation lands, timber company holdings and private property, according to Smallcomb.
They flew about 500 feet over the ground, looking for the particular color and shape of marijuana plants, he said. They are also trained to verify what they saw was marijuana once they land, according to Smallcomb.
“If it looks like it’s on public land, we can get the location — the latitude and longitude on a map — and we go eradicate it,” Smallcomb said.
[...] Ganja Farmer’s Emerald Triangle News Sheriff: We did a press release on this but go ahead… Rikess: I tell you what my people [...]