Fire crew scared off post in Los Padres National Forest.

Early Wednesday morning, at about 1:30am, a man was driving up Tassajara Road when he came up to a roadblock. He says it was more like an ambush, as he had never encountered a roadblock there.

The man—whose name the Weekly agreed to withhold because he says he is afraid for his safety—got out of his car and began to move the roadblock so he could drive through.

That's when he saw them: three men wielding handguns running up a hill toward him.

"They were grinning ear to ear," the man says.

He bolted toward his car, got in and drove away. He says he expected gunshots to hit the back of his vehicle as he fled, but nothing happened. As he drove off, he says two other men stared at him from inside a Jeep Cherokee parked just off the road.

"It made it suspicious," he says, "because police were sitting there at the bottom of the road, keeping people from coming in."

Tassajara Road is currently closed to the public due to the ongoing battle against the Soberanes Fire, and the area is under evacuation orders, although numerous residents have stayed as firefighters conduct controlled burns in an effort to keep the blaze from burning through Cachagua. 

The resident reported the incident to California Highway Patrol.

Earlier that night, Monterey County Sheriff's deputies received a call that a fire crew trying to clear an area along Tassajara Road, near China Camp, had been confronted by three men.

The fire crew told authorities they would not go into that area—which is in Los Padres National Forest, where authorities regularly encounter dozens of illegal pot grows every year—unless law enforcement checked it out first.

The fire crew told authorities they were "confronted," but weren't specific about what was said to them, according to Sheriff's Cmdr. John Thornburg. 

Thornburg says the firefighters did not see the three men carrying any weapons during the incident.

But since firefighters have discovered numerous pot grows while fighting the Soberanes Fire, Thornburg says they may have felt unsafe, believing the men might have been drug cartel members.

After receiving the report, sheriff's deputies scoured the forest for hours and located the three men, who they say are Mexican nationals.

The men told deputies they were hikers who had taken a ride or two to get into the area, deep in the national forest, but deputies were skeptical.

"Were they drug cartel-related? We don't know," Thornburg says. 

Authorities found no weapons, no marijuana farms nearby and had no evidence as a basis to keep the men in custody. The trio was released shortly after.

Wednesday's incident is the fourth encounter firemen have had with suspected marijuana growers in the Los Padres National Forest since the Soberanes Fire broke out July 22, Thornburg says. 

"They say they keep running into them," Thornburg adds. "But fortunately, no one has had a weapon."