A turtle, a ranger and a marijuana sting

It's not very often that things get dull around here in the summer. Something is always happening, but even so, it's still fun to troll the Internet first thing in the morning and find out what's going on in the other nooks and crannies in the world.

It can be particularly fun to see what's going on in other national parks and one of the best places to find that out is a little Web site the National Park Service calls the morning report.

The report features everything from obituaries to natural disasters to job openings to fires and fond farewells.

For example, I bet you didn't know this, but there was a wildfire in Glacier National Park on Aug. 4. It was called the Kintla Lake Fire. It burned less than a tenth of an acre and is 100 percent contained.

But a report the other day really caught my eye and it was about a turtle and a ranger and a marijuana sting.

That's right, a turtle, a ranger and a marijuana sting.

See, we tend to think of national parks as these big brawling places of majesty and beauty, and many of them are. But others are not. Others are relatively small and in urban areas, and yet they're still fairly remote and quiet places — even though they're close to big cities. Having a remote, quiet place near a big city also stories a chord with the capitalist underground and more than one park on more than one occasion has proven to host a successful marijuana growing operation.

Such was the case in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C. Judging from its Web site it's an idyllic little place with its own planetarium and creek (thus the name).

At any rate, in Rock Creek Park there's a ranger named Ken Ferebee. And Ferebee, on July 14, was tracking a box turtle outfitted with a radio transmitter.

(Just about anything with legs can be outfitted with a radio transmitter. In Glacier, they've even outfitted toads with radio transmitters.)

At any rate, Ferebee was following this turtle through the Park, which led him, to lo and behold, a pleasant little marijuana patch.

Ferebee then notified Park police of the pleasant little marijuana patch.

Park policeman David Hurley and Jeffrey Bloch then found themselves a nice place to hide near the patch. Staked it out for some hours, and caught a feller, Isiah Johnson, 19, tending to his plants. Search warrants were obtained and Johnson was subsequently charged with growing a marijuana garden in a national park, which is certainly capitalism in the good old American sense of the word, but also illegal.

My grandfather, who was successful dairy farmer, always joked that he was going to grow a half acre of pot back in woods. He never did, but he certainly knew the value of said commodity.

(I jest, of course; Johnson was charged with possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute.)

The Park Service credited the wayward turtle for the bust. They have since named her Officer Mary Jane Hempfield. I am not making that up.

You can read the morning report yourself at: http://home.nps.gov/applications/morningreport/.

Chris Peterson is the photographer for the Hungry Horse News.