Rockingham county is the other side of the mountains, about 50 miles from Fauquier county, but I bet "sang" grows there too. In Selling Nature's Treasures, Dozens Buy Trouble By Peter Whoriskey Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page B01 Out in the rural towns around Shenandoah National Park, word got around about Elkton's small country sporting goods store. The proprietor trafficked in the area's illicit natural prizes. Two hundred dollars for a black bear's gallbladder. Three hundred fifty for a pound of wild ginseng root, even if it was harvested illegally. Dozens of people from several states stopped by, or called, to buy or sell. Their trophies, it was understood, would be headed into the vast international black market for the substances, which are believed to have medicinal benefits. It was all a trick. Yesterday, officials with the National Park Service and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries announced the sting operation based at the Elkton store. It was all part of a multiyear, multi-state investigation into the illegal harvest or sale of American ginseng and black bear organs, much of it for exportation to Asia. More than 100 people from several states could face charges resulting from the investigation, which tracked the illicit plants with a recently developed arsenal of special dyes and silicon chips. More than 40 people have been charged in sealed indictments. Two were in custody. The investigation tied wild ginseng taken from Shenandoah National Park to markets as far afield as New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong and South Korea. Much of it was harvested by residents who have dug "sang" for generations in a pastime as old as Daniel Boone. "The demand is huge, and the demand is growing," said Clay Jordan, acting chief ranger at the park. "This is from one small [undercover] dealer in one small mountain town. Multiply this by everywhere that ginseng grows, and you begin to get an idea of the scope of what we're dealing with." Wild ginseng is considered more potent than the cultivated ginseng that typically winds up in health food stores and is promoted as an energy booster with other benefits. Its harvest and export from the United States to Asia dates back more than 200 years. In the hills of North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, residents have long made use of or exported the plant -- Daniel Boone reportedly among them. As far back as the 1820s, roughly 4 million pounds was exported in a decade, according to Department of Commerce statistics. "It cheers the heart even of a man that has a bad wife," wrote the 18th-century Virginia author William Byrd, who used to chew it. "It promotes insensible perspiration, dissolves all phlegmatic and viscous humors that are apt to obstruct the narrow channels of the nerves. It helps the memory, and would quicken even Helvetian dulness." But with wild ginseng roots fetching as much as $350 a pound in recent years, the result of a voracious international market, the backwoods tradition has depleted the stock of the wild plants in many states. Some national parks have proved particularly vulnerable because, while the harvest of wild ginseng in some states is legal on many properties with the required permits, the shortage of the plants has pushed many diggers into national parks such as the Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains. A recent study at Shenandoah suggested that the population of ginseng may have dropped as much as 75 percent over the last 30 years; another study showed that roughly two-thirds of the ginseng in the park is young, the mature plants having been taken. To combat the sang diggers, known to travel around the parks with screwdrivers or long sharp sticks to cut out the roots, investigators have taken to dyeing the roots bright orange and marking them with silicon chips to identify them for potential future prosecutions. People continue to "go sangin' " because their families have done it for decades as a pastime, and partly for the income, ginseng dealers said. "Finding a four-prong [mature] plant is like killing an eight-point buck," said Max Smith, a Virginia dealer who said he has a spoonful of the ground-up root every morning as an "energy enhancer." "It's a trophy." Jim Chamberlain, a research scientist with the Forest Service who has studied the harvest and exportation of the plant over time, said those who hunt it "are often people from very poor areas where there's high unemployment and low incomes. There's a great incentive to go out and collect it. That's Christmas presents for their kids or a new washing machine." While the ginseng enforcement is aimed at a species in severe decline, the black bear population is considered healthy enough that hunts are organized to control it. Officials said they are pursuing the black market in bear parts in order to rein in the demand. The exploitation of ginseng and bears has driven both species to near extinction in Asia, officials noted. Though the bears' gallbladders sell for $200 apiece locally, they sell for more than $3,000 overseas, officials said, because they are in demand as a part of traditional Chinese medicine. Uses include treatments for cancer, burns, pain, asthma, diabetes and liver disorders. Bear paws, which are often made into soup, can fetch as much as $1,000 overseas. "The exploitation of Virginia's natural resources will not be tolerated," said Marsha Garst of the commonwealth's attorney's office of Rockingham County and Harrisonburg. "Do you want your children to have to go to a zoo to see a black bear?"