Camping Coffee Pot

Pot farm cleanup attempts to reclaim wildlands

Early on a recent Saturday morning, two men wearing camouflage fatigues parked a pickup truck deep in the Mendocino County backwoods. They checked their gear. Industrial trash bags, weapons, water, food and first aid in place, they were ready to descend to the illegal camps more than 1,000 feet below.

The men were there to reclaim an area of Mendocino woodlands polluted by a large marijuana garden split into two locations. After an hour-long hike to the camp, they worked through heat, poison oak and biting insects. They also worked through the knowledge that armed growers might return.

The pair cleaned up 20 sleeping bags, propane tanks, a BB rifle and ammunition, 9mm ammunition, a crossbow, foodstuffs, cooking utensils, and other camping necessities.

After several hours, they had the trash bundled. The next morning, it took a helicopter 45 minutes and four trips to remove five contractor bags, each with more than 125 pounds of trash. It took away another 850 pounds of irrigation tubing and pipes.

The unusual cleanup was organized by the Northern California Wildlands Reclamation Coalition, a group of Mendocino County residents who have banded together to repair the wreckage inflicted by illegal marijuana farms and return the area's forests to their natural state.

With the approval of local law enforcement, they remove the plastics, batteries, poisons, piping, tubing, garbage and other environmental hazards and eyesores - attempting to leave the woodlands as pristine as possible.

The environmental damage done by pot growers is severe. They've poisoned waterways and trampled native landscapes.

Paul Trouette, a Mendocino County Fish and Game commissioner and coffee shop owner in Willits, established the group last year.

As president of the nonprofit Mendocino County Blacktail Association, Trouette and his friends had grown increasingly concerned about the harm done to local wildlife in and around these grow sites. They also were worried about the dangers to hunters who could easily stumble upon life-threatening booby traps or armed growers.

At grow sites and camps, cleanup crews find pesticides and other poisons intended for rodents and deer. With many illegal gardens having hundreds of marijuana plants, the amount of spilled poison has had a dramatic and cascading impact on wildlife and the ecosystem. A rat or deer eats the poison, gets sick and becomes easy prey. The predatory animal then dies and is eaten by scavenging animals, such as coyotes, foxes or vultures, which absorb the poison as well.

Portable Butane Stove-Coleman Camping Coffee Maker | Portable ...

I recently purchased this coffee maker for car camping/mountain biking trips around Wisconsin. I always wished I could have coffee on the mornings that I woke up at the campsite. Percolators do not work well (in my experience) so I had basically given up until I saw one of these at a sporting goods store. I did some review checking online and all I read was good reviews on this particular model (apparently some of the earlier models had some minor issues). It really does work great! I have been using it on my old 2-burner coleman camp stove (coleman fuel) that my dad gave me (it’s probably 30 years old). Contrary to what some people have said about it taking a long time to brew, some saying as much as 45 minutes, it took me about 10 minutes to brew a pot of coffee with cold water. I just cranked up the flame to high and it only took a couple mintutes for the water to heat up enough to start making it’s way up to the basket and start dripping into the pot. Makes coffee as good…

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This coffee maker will make you feel you are home. I use it with a two burner propane stove and after finding the spot where the carafe should sit (the handle must align with two dots market in the surface) is like brewing with a regular coffee maker. Furthermore I did buy it on sale 50% off regular price, at .00, I couldn’t get a percolator that good. This coffee maker will be perfect for a family camping, not so for backwood camping when you don’t need bulky stuff, and won’t have to worry of breaking the carafe.

The first two times I tried to use it the coffee did not drip through the filter into the carafe. I finally realized that its “pause and serve lever” is not well designed. At least with my device, when the filter basket is opened and then closed, the “pause and serve” lever does not always line up with the the trap door under the filter basket. So even when the carafe was in place, the trap door was not opening to let the coffee through. Once I figured that out, it worked quite well.

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