Five Hours North

It was 2008, and Tyler Kearns was watching the financial infrastructure of the world crumble, leaving half the people he knew unemployed and desperate. Ty was supposed to be headed to college. He was supposed to be getting a degree in green energy management, a field that checked all his interests: sustainability, land management, new technologies . . . But the news got worse every day, and he didn’t want to rack up a mountain of student debt only to graduate into the worst job market this nation had seen since the Great Depression.   He never wanted to be a “grower.” That wasn’t the plan.   But Ty Kearns grew up in Humboldt County, California. Like any native of the mountainous region, he was a student of Humboldt’s unique history, from the first hippie driving up from San Francisco to grow his own reefer, to the green rush in the 2000s that drew migrant pickers from all over the world and employed half of the stay-at-home moms in the county.   His aunt owned land in the mountains and so, to pay his tuition and get a legit career, he fell back on the industry he knew was recession proof—growing cannabis. Ty scribbled notes in lectures during the week before hightailing it five hours north into the mountains of Humboldt County to tend his plants on weekends.   It was an outlaw’s life. Tyler smuggled the harvest from his grow site to the buyer’s hands with only his kayak to camouflage the clandestine mission. He faced down mountain lions, shivered in a sleeping bag in the snow, and jerry-rigged showers in a kiddie pool so that he could watch over his fledgling crop. On Mondays he headed back to class to pursue his real, legitimate dreams.   The first year alone, he made over $100,000.   Communing with the land and raising a harvest fulfilled the naturalist in him, but growing was supposed to be a temporary gig. In no time, he was making so much money that it was almost impossible to pump the brakes.   Eventually, Tyer accepted his fate. Growing pot wasn’t supposed to be his destiny, but he was excellent at it. He just needed to come out of the shadow of the mountain.   He moved to Sacramento, where marijuana was still in a legal gray area but was much less risky to grow than it was in Humboldt. Starting over, he discovered, provided the gift of reinvention. Today Tyler is the CEO of SevenLeaves, a fully licensed cannabis cultivation operation with product in over three hundred stores. And his dream of working in green energy is not forgotten: SevenLeaves is powered by 100 percent green energy, proof of Tyler’s belief that our relationship with the earth should be symbiotic, not exploitative, even if you’re an entrepreneur.   Five Hours North is a modern American Green Dream story filled with outlaw adventures, a cast of memorable mountain characters, and one man’s search for a way out that just might lead him back to himself.