This article originally appeared in High Times Magazine’s 50th Anniversary Print Issue. Order yours here and get it delivered to your door.
The roads are quieter now in the Emerald Triangle. On stretches of State Route 299, the sight of logging trucks has returned. Humboldt County’s timber economy once defined the region—until environmental restrictions, overharvesting, and shifts in global trade forced its decline in the 1990s. Cannabis filled the gap. What followed was another cycle of boom, regulation, and retreat—weed and wood: two strands shaping the DNA of California’s North Coast.
Fishing faded. Mills closed. Tourism never quite arrived. The economy leaned heavily on cannabis—first underground, then medical, now licensed. Cal Poly Humboldt, once a forestry school, has shifted with the times, offering a cannabis studies minor, partnering with regenerative farms, and funding applied research. The pivot mirrored the plant’s deep roots here.
The change didn’t come all at once. Proposition 215 ushered in a medical gray zone in 1996, but the true “Green Rush” unfolded a decade later. From roughly 2007 until just before Prop 64 passed in 2016, growers, speculators, and capital poured in. Hillsides were cleared for hoop houses. Gas stations and garden centers overflowed. In Willow Creek, there were even traffic jams.
Amy and Jacques Neukom, who run Neukom Family Farm on the banks of the Trinity River, remember how dizzying it was. Their diversified organic farm has been rooted in Willow Creek for over three decades, featuring a CSA model that incorporates fruit, vegetables, livestock, and cannabis. “There were people everywhere,” Jacques says. “Gas stations, grocery stores, garden centers—everything was packed. We had two giant garden centers in town.”
Solstice potlucks and neighborly bartering gave way to bulldozers carving terraces into every slope. Dylan Mattole, who has farmed in Southern Humboldt for …
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Author: Jackie Bryant / High Times
