North Vancouver RCMP seized about 300 marijuana plants when they busted up a large outdoor grow operation on Mount Seymour.
The grow-op was initially spotted and reported by a helicopter flying over last week. On Tuesday, members of the RCMP bike section hiked to the grow-op site with the aid of GPS.
Const. Quentin Frewing, one of the officers on scene, said it was a sophisticated setup.
“They had electronic timers that would water the plants at certain times of the day without them needing to be around,” he said.
“They’d taken more than a kilometre worth of three-quarter-inch hose and hiked it up the mountain, uphill away from the marijuana plants, and put the end inside a creek and let gravity do the rest of the work — they didn’t need to have a generator to pump water for water pressure.”
Frewing said that the number of outdoor grow operations has decreased but they are still around, especially in less densely populated areas.
“We haven’t heard about one this large in North Vancouver for quite some time,” he said.
