Huge Poaching Investigation Under Way In Cowlitz County WA With Ten Men Under Suspicion

Fucking assholes. There is no shortage of Meth Headed Rednecks running around all over the place up there and this isn't the first time I have heard about poaching rings around that area either but the article says it may cover a ten year, two state crime spree involving hundreds of Elk, Deer, Bear and Cougars in total.
Cowlitz County is pretty big and most of it is hilly timber country. Mt. St. Helens is just outside the Eastern border in Skamania county and you can see it from almost all of Cowlitz county. It's southern border is the Columbia river and I have lived and worked up there a couple of times for a year or two.

This kind of shit pisses me off.

Massive poaching probe targets Cowlitz residents

Up to 10 men from Cowlitz County are the target of a massive, multi-year poaching investigation in Oregon and Washington that looked into the killings of dozens of deer, elk, bear, cougar and other animals, according to court records and media reports.

Names of the suspects have not been made public because they have not yet been arrested.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Oregon State Patrol are the lead agencies.

Oregon State Police say that the case got started last year, after headless buck deer started turning up on trails.

There isn't shit for work up in that area and the wages being offered suck too.It's been that way for decades now.
The unemployment rate is over 7% and Kelso, the county seat and where I used to live, has turned into a drug infested shit hole.
I had a friend who got murdered the day after we moved from that little slice of Hell, he had helped me move and got stabbed by a drug addled crazy bitch the day after we were done. There were also 13 registered sex offenders within the one mile walk to the local school.
At one time it was lumber country with mills going full blast 24/7 but all that went away back in the 70's and 80's along with the rest of the West coast.
Kelso also once had the dubious claim to fame as being the worlds biggest smelt producer. All that has gone away too. Now you can't hardly fill a bucket with a net on a pole when back in the day they had boats just for catching smelt.

For those old enough to remember, when Mt St. Helens blew her stack back in 1980, it plugged up the Toutle river with debris.
The Toutle dumps in to the Cowlitz river, which runs right through the middle of Kelso, splitting it into East and West.
Kelso shares a Western border with the city of Longview and just South of Kelso is where the Cowlitz river dumps into the Columbia river. Longview has an international port on the Columbia.
I worked on the dredges unplugging the Columbia right after Mt. St. Helens blew. It closed the shipping lane in the Columbia with all the debris that went down the Toutle, then the Cowlitz and into the Columbia.

Even back then I remember people getting busted for poaching.
10 guys on a multi year, multi state spree is something on a new level of jackassery though.