Small towns in the West obliterated by fire (Part V): Growers hunkered down to protect pot farms in the Emerald Triangle

 The Los Angeles Times reports from Trinity County, population 13,786, one of three California counties with no incorporated cities.  Here's the lede for Anita Chabria's story:  

Nate Trujillo sat on a windy ridge and watched California’s largest wildfire, the August Complex, work its way toward the cannabis-growing enclave of Post Mountain-Trinity Pines, where many of the locals are refusing to evacuate.

Law enforcement officers went door to door warning of the danger a few days ago, but “we couldn’t force people to leave,” said Trujillo, a narcotics deputy in the Trinity County Sheriff’s Department. “It’s mainly growers. And a lot of them, they don’t want to leave because that is their livelihood.”

It is a critical time of year in the Emerald Triangle, a three-county corner of Northern California that by some estimates is the nation’s largest cannabis-producing region.

Trinity Pines alone is home to up to 40 legal farms, with more than 10 times that number of illegal grows hidden off its dirt roads, according to people familiar with this part of the Trinity Alps, inland from Humboldt.

Each farm has crops worth half a million dollars or more, and many are within days or weeks of harvest, making growers wary of leaving vulnerable to either flames or thieves. Among the holdouts are numerous Hmong families, originally from Laos and other Southeast Asian countries, who have moved to the area in recent years, along with Bulgarians and Russians and a smattering of neighbors drawn by the remote beauty of towering cedars and firs.

One estimate put the value of the legal crop alone at about $20 million.

Don't miss the rest of the story for some significant insights into the economics of the so-called Emerald Triangle (Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties)--and also insights into why I subscribe to the Los Angles Times, which provides terrific coverage of rural northern California, no matter its distance from the So Cal metroplex(es).