The Wild Cat Road skips along a ridge line, a narrow, half-paved, half-washed-out track that once carried much of the world's finest cannabis to market.
Even in mists that obscured its treacherous course as it bows toward the Pacific, the road hummed in tune with the family cannabis farms around it. Now there is little cannabis to carry, nor "trimmigrants" who traveled here to the Mattole River Valley to pick the flower that made Humboldt County shorthand for the best cannabis around.
"I'm not making it," said Drew Barber, 48, who has grown cannabis here for more than 15 years, watching the price for his product shrink from $1,200 a pound to about a third of that today. "I can't lose money from one year to the next, and it's getting to be that time when I have to decide if I can go on."
The irony, bitter and true, is shared on the front porches of hillside homesteads across this valley where the King Range mountains and the San Andreas Fault meet the sea. The once-mystical heart of the nation's cannabis industry is dying, fast, strangled not by law enforcement but by the high taxes and baffling regulation that have crushed small farmers since state voters approved legalization almost six years ago.
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