A Walk in the Woods Meets Blow

Rolling Stone contributing edior editor Mark Binelli has a remarkable profile up at the magazine's website of Nate Norman and his unremarkable group of young friends from Coeur d'Arlene, Idaho -- kids who built an overnight empire importing marijuana from nearby Canada. On foot.

Smugglers have buried stashes in semi trucks filled with wood chips and driven across the border. They have hidden pot in buses, in horse trailers, on trains and in mobile homes driven by gray-haired retirees. They speed across the border on snowmobiles. They kayak backwoods rivers, or fill the fiberglass hulls of yachts and sail down. They fly small planes, low, dropping their loads at agreed-upon locales -- farms, raspberry fields -- without landing. They have dug a 360-foot tunnel, beginning in a Quonset hut in Canada and ending in the living room of a home in Lynden, Washington. They drag their stashes underwater, behind fishing boats, so the line can be cut if an agent approaches; buoys, attached to the loads with dissolvable strips of zinc, rise to the surface the following day. They float hollowed-out logs, outfitted with GPS tracking systems, down the Kettle River. And some -- "the bravest," says Skogstad, "but not necessarily the brightest" -- hike the seven-mile border crossing, through the forest, on foot.

[...]

Runners would cross the border, six at a time, carrying long canvas hockey bags filled with cash -- eventually as much as $400,000 a run. In Canada, they would meet their contacts from Nelson on an old closed road and exchange the cash for weed. They always crossed at night. Once they were back in America, a truck would swing by and pick up the weed. Topher and his men would spend the rest of the night in the woods and be picked up around sunrise. Aside from the obvious demands of hiking for miles with heavy loads, they had some close calls. One night, Topher stumbled across a DEA agent, asleep in his truck; another time, they got lost and nearly froze to death when the temperature dropped to fourteen below zero.

Whole story here.

[Cross-posted at The Agitator.]