GRANT AIDS ANTI-MARIJUANA SQUAD; TRAINING, GEAR TARGET BACKCOUNTRY GROWERS.

Byline: Michael Coit Daily News Staff Writer

After pulling out record numbers of marijuana gardens in the mountains last year, the Ventura County sheriff's narcotics unit got a federal grant to crack down further on the planting, cultivation, packaging and sale of marijuana.

The extra $20,000 mostly paid for overtime to attend training sessions hosted by the U.S. Forest Service Service this summer, and for conducting raids. New equipment was purchased, including video cameras for surveillance, fire axes that feature cutting blades and are heavy enough to hack down the hearty plants, and military-style boots, pants and shirts offering camouflage.

``We were able to outfit our unit better. The training for us was a big plus,'' said Sgt. Arnie Aviles, who has helped lead the sheriff's drug interdiction effort since 1985. ``We were way better prepared.''

Once outfitted, however, they were literally dressed up with next-to-nowhere to go.

The few gardens found were primitive plots of a dozen or more plants in areas easily accessible compared with the elaborate gardens of the past, which had as many as 9,800 plants fed by irrigation pipes and tended by outlaws camped in the brush, officials said.

This year's largest haul was a 250-plant indoor operation in Thousand Oaks raided by sheriff's narcotics detectives in July. A week earlier, sheriff's narcotics detectives happened on more than two dozen marijuana plants in a Moorpark home during a search for meat stolen from a local market.

``For some reason, this year we didn't come into any major groves, which was real unusual,'' said Aviles. ``We had a few 10- and 20-plant groves of little sophistication at all.''

Ventura County can offer Edens for marijuana gardens.

The Los Padres National Forest features remote, often rugged areas with good growing conditions, namely abundant water supplies and cover from brush and low trees.

Smaller, more well-concealed plots have been found in pockets along the range of the Santa Monica Mountains from Malibu to Point Mugu.

Covering the vast areas requires helicopter flyovers to spot marijuana plots that then must be watched intensively to arrest growers.

``We went into our wilderness area with several reconnaissance teams at sites of previous groves, where there was water and a high likelihood of groves,'' Aviles said. ``We did a lot of flights and on foot. We even spent a night on one particular reconnaissance.''

Yet the haul hardly compared with recent years. In 1996, authorities pulled out and destroyed nearly 40,000 plants valued at some $160 million.

One reason for the dearth of pot pulling was the arrest of a ring of growers based out of Los Angeles that cultivated their crops in both the Angeles and Los Padres forests, Aviles said. There was no coincidence that last year's arrest by Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives resulted in an absence of those types of sophisticated plots this year, he said.

``They had a jump on them. They were able to do some surveillance and identify these players,'' Aviles said. ``As a matter of fact, one of the arrestees said he worked out there.

``They had gardens identical to our gardens. There were several groves that were a thousand-plus plants and those were all identical.''

Ventura County had been gaining prominence as a prime growing ground, and officials said the trend could resume next year as easily as it waned this year.

Forest Service officials noted the trend through the first half of the decade. The backcountry in Ventura County is accessible by road and yet can still be rugged. With the forest covering some 40 percent of the county, there is a lot of ground to cover for sheriff's and Forest Service teams.

The primary obstacle is finding a water source to tap.

After drought and fire over a decade ending in the early 1990s, the Los Padres forest once again offers abundant water and brush and trees to sustain and conceal gardens. And the El Nino weather pattern and the rain it's forecast to spawn could sustain good growing conditions in 1998, officials said.

``It just depends on how warm it stays and for how long,'' Aviles said. ``This year, there was a good supply of water and the weather was optimum.''