Deep in the Appalachian woods near the Knox-Bell county line, Kentucky State Police Trooper Dewayne Holden's Humvee belched smoke and roared as it struggled up what once was an old logging trail.

As his three-truck convoy stopped at a clearing atop a 3,000-foot ridge, Holden grabbed a machete and joined eight other armed troopers and National Guardsmen, hiking toward a hill under some power lines.

Keeping an eye out for nail pits, pipe bombs and poison-snake booby traps, they found fresh ATV tracks.

The pot growers had beaten them to the prize: Gone were the 40 to 50 marijuana plants worth as much as $100,000 that Holden spotted from a helicopter more than a week earlier. Only six spindly plants were left.

"Well, that's six they won't get," he said, shrugging and pulling them out of the dirt. "Sometimes they just get here before we do."

Welcome to the battle police and marijuana growers wage each fall in Kentucky's remote Appalachian counties, where 75 percent of the state's top cash crop is grown.

Kentucky produces more marijuana than any other state except California, making it home to one of the nation's more intensive eradication efforts -- a yearly game of harvest-time cat and mouse in national forests, abandoned farms, shady hollows, backyards and mountainsides.

More than 100 state police, guardsmen, DEA agents, U.S. Forest Service spotters and others are part of a strike force based in London that works dawn to dark, sometimes roping into remote patches from Blackhawk helicopters.

With a budget of $1.5 million and help from a $6 million federal anti-drug effort in the region, last year the state seized 557,628 marijuana plants worth an estimated $1.3 billion.

"We're essentially in a race with the grower to get it before he does," said State Police Lt. Ed Shemelya, head of the eradication unit. This time of year, "it's not uncommon for us to be on one side of a hill eradicating, and on the other a grower is harvesting."