Here's a ground view look at two of the three human figures of the Blythe Intaglios. The largest human figure is 171 tall. I pulled this video off of YouTube, since I haven't been out to see these myself.
As a kid from the 1970's, growing up with three channels of TV, we didn't see much programming on the weird and mysterious stuff of the world, that was covered in books, and a handful of magazines then. We did get the TV series In Search Of, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, best known to us then as Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series. That show, in the late 1970', got into mysteries like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Nazca Lines in Peru, among others. I was always fascinated by these weird mysteries. Those 70's era shows on these topics, and nearly every show since, have not found definitive answers to most of these mysteries. There is some evidence now that some of the Nazca lines line up with underground streams, and entrances to those streams, so native people of Peru could find water in that desert. But that may only explain some of the famous Nazca lines. Then there's the Ancient Aliens idea that they were made to contact aliens or something, but I'm not buying that idea.
Somewhere else along my path, I heard of a huge human figure, a geoglyph, visible best from the air, in Southern California. Nobody seemed to know who made it, or how old it was. That figure, scraped in to the earth, has been one of those mysteries in the back of my head for decades. Since we are officially still pretty much in lock down mode from the Covid-19 pandemic, and I don't have a car, I decided to start looking up some of these mysteries. I figured I can do some computer research on some of these mysteries while I'm unable to do other things. At some point, I'd like to go check these things out in person.
So I looked up what is best known as the Blythe Intaglio. "Intaglio" is a word for geoglyphs up humans, I guess. It's a huge geoglyph of a man, about 171 feet tall. These days, with Google Maps, it's easy to find. You can serach it on Google Maps, switch to satellite view, and zoom into to see it. It's about 15 miles north of Blythe, California, which is about 200 miles east of Los Angeles, real close to the California/Arizona border, and the Colorado River. Blythe is a desert town, right on I-10, and is the first city in California when coming from the East on I-10. For SoCal people coming back from Arizona, it's the "We made it back to Cali" town.
My first surprise was that there isn't one Intaglio, there are three human figures there, one four legged animal, and a spiral thing. I always heard there was just one big guy (and we know it's a male because he has a dick). Those three were rediscovered by pilot George Palmer, flying over the area in 1932. He reported it to some scientists in Los Angeles, who studied them a couple of years later. Once word got out, people started visiting the intaglios, and they began to get damaged. Those four, best known intaglios (just off of Route 95), are now fenced off, but your can park nearby, and walk up to the fence to see them.
Already surprised that there were more than one of these huge, mysterious figures, I looked them up on Wikipedia. None of the indigenous tribes of the area claim to have made them, although some used them in ceremonies at times. Even more amazing, there aren't just four big geoglyphs in California, there are more than 200 intaglios, mostly near the Colorado River.
This is my bad photo from Google Maps, of the Kokopelli intaglio, located a ways east of Blythe, and more remote than the others, though still close to a road. This odd figure with braids or dreadlocks, playing a flute, is as big, or bigger, than the other human figures. It looks to be about 180 feet tall. There's another, much smaller intaglio across the river, called the Fisherman intaglio, that's only about 15 feet tall.
So this mystery that I heard of 30-40 years ago, just got more mysterious. There are hundreds of these things, not just one, here in Southern California, Arizona, and maybe further up the Colorado River. No one knows who made them, what they are for, or how old they are. You can't carbon date rocks, because they're not organic. But Wikipedia says someone got a date of 900 BCE to 1200 CE (A.D.) by carbon dating something associated with them. If those dates are accurate, that makes these mysterious figures 800 to 2,900 years old. That's a pretty wide range. So these could have been made as far back as 100 years after King Tutankhamen in Egypt was alive.
So there's a quick look at the Blythe Intaglios, a much bigger mystery than I first thought, and right here in the Southern California desert, a 3-4 hour drive from here.
In this episode of America Unearthed, host and forensic geologist Scott Wolter takes a look at mysterious stone walls, in the East Bay area, near San Francisco. This episode bounces east, and makes a strong case that the Chinese of the Ming Dynasty made it to America in the early 1400's. It's also possible that earlier Chinese expeditions, perhaps carrying explorer Marco Polo, made it to North America, as well.
I've been fascinated by archeology, the explained, and the unexplained artifacts, in the world since I was a kid. The mysterious, 50 mile long stone walls in the Bay Area are another interesting historical anomaly. In a little side note, the searcher on Oak Island, in Nova Scotia, Canada, found a Chinese coin this past summer (2020), featured in the current season of the show, The Curse of Oak Island. The coin dates from 200 B.C.E. to about 900 A.D. Personally, I think humans traveled a lot farther in ancient, and even pre-historical times, than we give them credit for. I think there are whole chapters of human history, yet to be revealed.
The Notorious RBG music video. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18th, 2020, at the age of 87. By the time of her death, she had become a heroine of the political Left, women of all persuasions, and an icon in American pop culture.Not bad for an Octogenarian.
She left behind a legacy and a career of standing up for the U.S. Constitution, and the rights of all kinds of minority and disenfranchised groups, particularly women. In a rushed Senate confirmation, she was illegally replaced by judge Amy Coney Barrett, who needs to be immediately impeached. This act was spearheaded by the biggest traitor to America of the 21st century, U.S. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who also should be immediately impeached, and tried on multiple counts of treason. Since the U.S. as a democratic republic is collapsing, that won't happen. That is unfortunate... for everyone.
All un-American activities aside, I decided to draw a tribute drawing to Ruth Bader Ginsburg after her death, in my unique Sharpie scribble style. Much to my surprise, this drawing became my most popular drawing ever. A full size, 18" X 24" print of this drawing is now on an office wall in a supreme court building of a Western state. I definitely didn't expect that.
"Where Brooklyn at?"
Here's a segment, with one of the last short interviews with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This 5'1", highly intelligent and and hardworking woman, left a shadow across this whole nation.
R.I.P. R.B.G.. And if you can pull a few strings up there, go for it. The justice system you fought so hard to improve, and uphold, is under continuous and constant attack from anti-democracy forces on the political Right, most of the "Christian" community, and many in the business world.
Let the downward spiral begin... wait... I mean continue. It began in September 2019, with the Repo market crisis. It comes in waves. The next downward wave will come soon, I believe. I found this gem of a vintage, public domain, bike photo in 2019, and made this meme. I think this photo it a good metaphor for the first six months of 2021. The financial markets will rebound quickly off the coming lows, but will struggle to get back to today's levels. The real world economy, the one most of us live in, will struggle dramatically, for several years to come.
I think the first six months of 2021 will be the most serious downward spiral of what I call "The Phoenix Great Depression." That's my name for the 5 to 7 year long, real world economic slump/depression, that will be the bulk of the "Tumultuous 2020's. Many financial markets are peaking right now, as I begin to write this post at 6:25 am (Pacific) on January 4th, 2021. Unfortunately deaths form the Covid-19 pandemic, and lines at food banks nationwide, are also peaking. That's our dichotomy right now. Soaring stock, crypto, and precious metals markets, and even real estate in major cities. But at the same time, soaring numbers of personal and business bankruptcies and numbers of small businesses struggling and going out of business. Several million people are on the verge of eviction, being helped by moratoriums. We're peaking on the top and bottom of economic indicators at the same time.
Eleven months ago, when nearly everyone thought the financial markets were going to soar, I predicted a 9,800 point drop in the Dow. My predictions for the Dow, S&P 500, and Russell 2000, crazy as they were at the time, all came true in about 8 weeks. My Nasdaq prediction was in the ballpark. My predictions seemed ridiculous in late January, 2020, but were largely right, in direction, if not actual numbers. The The Fed created more new money than in any year in memory, as a response, and market bubbles inflated everywhere. The Fed's push to create absurd levels of new money, is something I dramatically under-estimated. Lesson learned, The Fed's job, it appears, is to prop up poorly run industrial corporations and the stock markets as a whole, into infinity. But it can't prop up everything, forever.
That said, here are my predictions that I think will happen in calendar 2021:
-The total number of American who die from Covid-19/coronavirus will exceed 750,000 by the end of 2021. That's more people than died in the U.S. Civil War. I don't think we'll get the "official" all clear from the virus until at least September 2021. The economic rebound from the pandemic will take much longer than people think.
-I predict the Dow Jones Industrial average will drop below 20,000, again, in 2021. It's at 30,394.93 right now.
-I think the Nasdaq will drop below 10,343 in 2021. It's at 12,877.92 right now. As the markets crash early this year, Big Money will, once again, flood into the top few Nasdaq tech stocks. Let's face it, "The Stock Market," at this point, is really only about ten stocks, FAANG and a few others. The rest don't matter at this point. That's a problem. In the stock market, you're no longer investing in companies, you're investing in The Fed inflating asset bubbles. February thru April will probably be the best opportunity to buy those ten or so stocks in the 2020's. If you're one of the 12 long term investors left in the world, this will be your chance.
-I think Bitcoin will drop below 23,000 in 2021. I also think Bitcoin will soar after that, and become the "Tesla stock" of 2021. Bitcoin 50,000 by year end is likely, and Bitcoin $100,000 would not surprise me. I think cryptos will become the "new stock market" to the Millennials and Gen Z investors/speculators. Cryptos make sense to them, the stock market won't after all the Robinhooders lose their ass in stocks in the next few months.
-I think the S&P 500 will drop below 2,700 in 2021. It's at 3,736.99 right now. It will rebound, but there won't be much of an overall return, especially when you consider the continued devaluing of the dollar, in calendar 2021.
-I think the Russell 2000 will drop below 1,300 in 2021. It's at 1,973.64 right now.
- I think gold will rise above $2,250 an ounce in 2021. It's at $1937.92/ounce right now.
- I think silver will rise about $43 an ounce in 2021. It's at $27.49/ounce right now.
-I think it's highly likely we will see serious food/poverty riots, in one or more major cities, in late spring of 2021. This will be the "darkest before the dawn" moment.
I'm not a financial advisor, and these predictions are my personal opinions. These predictions are for entertainment and education purposes, and should not be considered financial advice. My only personal investment right now is a small number of silver bullion coins.
All that said, if I had to invest in two things right now, that I think will survive the coming crash, and rebound to make a solid return in 2021, those two things would be Bitcoin and silver bullion. My third pick would be the top 2-5 FAANG stocks, and maybe a few other tech stocks.
I think we will finally see a widespread real estate downturn, maybe the true crash that is needed. But the continual flow of hyper-inflated money supply from The Fed may keep real estate from dropping as much as it should.
I'm writing this before the Georgia run-off elections, which will determine who controls the U.S. Senate, have happened, and as Donald Trump, our sitting president, is openly trying to find a way to overturn the election he lost in November. A lot of political craziness could happen in the next three weeks, which could dramatically affect the financial markets, time will tell.
Let's face it, 2020 through nearly everyone for a loop, myself included. But, being the economics and futurist geek that I am, I knew some crazy economic times were coming, two or three years ago. I've been blogging to try and warn people to prepare for the crazy times ahead since early 2018. One guy listened. I DID NOT see a 100 year pandemic coming, though, which made things get much crazier, much faster, on many levels. But I did make several financial predictions, in my blog, on January 26th, 2020, all of them would seem completely crazy to nearly all experts at the time. Mostly, I predicted a major drop in the stock markets, and a major recession, that I thought would turn into a full blown great depression . Here's the blog post with those predictions from 11 months ago. I got three of them right, and other headed in the direction I predicted, but didn't make the numbers I predicted.
Yesterday I dug into my predictions, researching my predictions versus what actually happened. That blog post, and my predictions for 2021, are coming soon. But along the way, I looked at several investments that did well last year, despite huge the economic crash, and the subsequent depression* (yes, we ARE, officially, in a depression). As anyone who ever looks at the stock market knows, the market, or at least some stocks, surged afterwards.
This happened for one reason only. The Federal Reserve created a gigantic, enormous, unprecedented, amount of money, basically out of thin air, and added it to the banking system, to prop up the banks, most major corporations, and the economy as a whole. The M2 money supply, an official stat, grew from $15.22 trillion to $19.3 trillion in 2020. It grew by an unprecedented 25.14% in one year (Dec. 2019-Nov. 2020). To put it simply, this means every dollar you had at the beginning of 2020 is now worth about 75 cents in buying power. Your dollars, overall, buy 25% less than they did a year ago. So for any investment to have the same buying power it had in January 2020, that investment had to increase by 25%, just to break even.
With that in mind, here are several of the most popular investments, and how they fared, from January 3rd, 2020, to December 31st, 2020.
Tesla stock- Up 696%.
Bitcoin- up 291%
Amazon stock-up 73.7%
Apple stock- up 71%
Netflix stock- up 64%
silver bullion- up 42.89%
Nasdaq (100 stock composite index)- up 42.86%
Facebook stock- up 30.9%
Alphabet (Google) stock- up 28.7%
gold bullion- up 24.28%
Dow Jones Industrial Average (30 stock composite index)- up 6.88%
Again... because of the unprecedented, intentional increase in the money supply in 2020, any investment had to grow by roughly 25% to have the same buying power. So any investment that grew less than 25% in 2020, actually went down in real value. For any of you making an hourly or salary wage, your paycheck is worth 25% less as well, in overall buying power. Yes, I know, some things (like gas) are cheaper than a year ago, and other things, like food, healthcare, and home prices in major cities, are generally more expensive. The loss of value in the dollar will become much more apparent over the next few years, as the massive increase in the money supply ripples through the economy. Inflation doesn't just raise every price evenly, all at once. Some things go up in price, and others may go down for a variety of reasons. Eventually, the value of any fiat money (currency not back by gold, or something of intrinsic value) drops to zero, and the currency becomes worthless. Here's a 1 minute video explaining hyper inflation, and here's a good 4 minute video explaining a gold standard currency versus fiat money (what our Federal Reserve notes are). The system is in collapse, that's the backstory to 2020, but that's a whole 'nother subject for another day.
You may notice that gold went in up price just over 24% in 2020 almost the exact amount the dollar went down in value. That's not an accident. Gold, over the long term, holds its value as currencies, like our dollar, go down in value. Gold, and precious metals may surge up or down at times, but over the mid and long term, gold and precious metals hold their value well. This is why wealthy people, and smart governments, buy gold ahead of turbulent economic times, and why many wealthy people were buying a lot of gold bullion in 2019, though pretty quietly.
My dad, Tom Emig, leaning against his 1957, powder blue, Ford Thunderbird, in 1964.
For an example of how a precious metal retains value over time, here's my personal favorite example. In 1964, my dad owned a classic 1957 Ford Thunderbird. He could drive to the gas station, and with a 1964 quarter (which was 90% silver then), buy a gallon of gas to go cruising in his T-Bird. Now, 1964 was the last year U.S. quarters were made mostly of silver. Quarters since then are made with far less valuable metals.
If you have an average 1964 quarter, you can sell it to a gold/silver dealer, jeweler, collector, or a pawn shop for $3.50 to $4.00 today. Gas, even the special, more expensive, less smog producing California blend, is $2.85 or $3 a gallon, as I write this, here in SoCal. So today, in 2021, that 1964 quarter (because of the silver value), if you sell it for its silver value, will still buy a gallon of gas 56 years later. The U.S. dollar is worth a lot less, but silver will still buy about the same amount of gasoline. That's an example of silver, as a store of value, over a 56 year period, where there's been a huge amount of cultural change holding its value compared to another important commodity, gasoline. While fiat currencies lose value over time, and eventually become worthless, things like precious metals, hold their value over time, and can be traded for the same amount of other commodities and items of intrinsic value.
The only good photo left of my dad's third T-Bird, the 1957 he's leaning against in the photo above. These T-birds, in good shape, are worth about $35,000 these days. My dad bought this one for $1,500 or so, I think, in 1983. Cars, classic ones anyhow, can also hold value over time well.
For decades before I was born, there were comic books about super heroes, people with powers far beyond normal human abilities, who saved mortal humans from evil villains. The underlying idea was that we can't handle shit on our own, some super being had to straighten stuff out. Those never interested me that much. But from the time I first remember Saturday morning cartoons, there was another group of young people, wandering around and solving mysteries. That's right, Scooby-Doo and gang from in the Mystery Machine. Generation X grew up with Scooby, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne, and Fred, who didn't need Superman, Batman, or Captain America. They figured stuff out on their own. Inspired by Scooby-Doo's posse, my generation was born to find mysteries, follow the leads, solve the mysteries, and then eat pizza. If that's not a cool life, I don't know what is.
Good or bad, Generation X was also born into the late Industrial Age, when conformity was all important, and we learned of the world mostly from mainstream newspapers, a few magazines, and three or four channels of TV. While there were plenty of cop dramas and murder mysteries on TV and in movies, and people exploring the mysteries of space at that time, the weird and historical mysteries didn't get much airtime, if any. But there were a few weird and unusual people, places, and events that popped up in our radar.
I grew up in Ohio, a state filled with farm country growing wheat, corn, and soybeans, mixed with industrial cities full of busy factories at that time. Most adults worked their factory or office jobs, and no one spent much time looking into odd facts, unusual historical places and people, and mysteries in my childhood world. But there were local stories, and books I'd pick up at garage sales about such things, every once in a while. If you talked openly about the possibility of UFO's, Sasquatch, or similar things, you were a weirdo back then.
The first cool weird thing I remember as a kid, was near where my grandparents lived in Wadsworth, Ohio. Wadsworth, is about 10-12 miles from Akron, home of Goodyear Tires, and about 35 miles straight south of Cleveland. Once in a while when I was a little kid, we'd take a drive around that area, and my dad, who grew up there, would point out "the giants house." This isn't one of the reported giants that researchers today, like Jim Viera, look for. The "giants' house" outside Seville, Ohio, was the home of a a real couple. My dad's dad, Bernal Emig, met this giant as a little boy. He was known as Captain Bates to the locals. Martin Van Buren Bates stood 7' 11", and he married Anna Swan, also 7' 11", and they became the tallest married couple in history, and still hold that record, to this day. They both traveled in circuses in their younger years, and later bought a farm in northern Ohio. Their farm house near Seville, Ohio had over sized doors, built to fit them, and was less than 5 miles from my grandparents' house in Wadsworth. When I was 7 or 8, we found a small book telling about their life, with drawings and photos of them. We drove by the Bates farm house quite a few times when I was little. Things like that fascinated me as a kid.
Another Ohio mystery that caught my attention as a kid, was the Great Serpent Mound. It was a huge, 4 or 5 foot high, more than 1,300 foot long "Indian mound." in southern Ohio, shaped like a snake eating an egg. Nobody knew exactly who made it, or why it was made. I tried to get my parents to take me to it, but we never made it there. As a school kid growing up in Ohio, we studied the Iroquois, and other native tribes from the region, but the Great Serpent Mound was the only mound we ever heard of in school in the 1970's. In the 40+ years since, it's become known that Ohio was a stronghold of the mound builders, and there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of ancient, earthen mounds, in Ohio. One of the biggest and most amazing mound complexes on earth, the Newark Earthworks, was about 35 miles from where my family lived in Coshocton, when I was in third grade. We had no idea something so amazing was a couple of cities away back then.
As my family moved around Ohio during my grade school years, I picked up a copy of Erich Von Daniken's 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods, which showed weird archeological finds from around the world, and the idea that aliens had something to do with all of these. I never read the whole book, and I still strongly doubt the "ancient aliens" idea, but I did read bits and pieces of the book. Things like the Antikythera "computer" got me intrigued. Who made these things? Why did they make them. How did they make them, when the technology didn't exist, as far a s we know.
I wasn't just interested in weird history as a kid, things like dinosaurs, Indians, and mainstream archeology fascinated me as well. I loved visiting Schoenbrunn village, a reconstructed pioneer town, in eastern Ohio. My family took us there several times as kids, and I went there on a couple of school field trips as well. Seeing how people lived in the 1700's and 1800's, in real log cabins, seemed cool as a kid. My friends and I always talked about building our own cabin in the woods when getting back from a trip to Schoenbrunn. Those plans ended quick, after moving 3 or 4 big branches, we realized how much work building a real cabin would be, and quickly gave up. Wherever my family moved to in Ohio, there was a patch of woods nearby, and from age 5 up, I was wandering around the local woods, as much as possible. I have always liked exploring, just wandering a new area, to see what's there, to see what I can find. I've been doing that, in one way or another, my whole life. This blog is taking that idea to the next level, and sharing stories of my own little adventures, and looking into weird places and mysteries I can do a little research on, and then share in a blog post.
About the same time, 1976-77, I picked up a weird story compilation book at a garage sale, for 25 cents, I think. In that book, I first heard of a supposed treasure that lay under an old oak tree, on Oak Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. I became an "acorn" as it's now called, an "Oak Island nut" (or enthusiast), from that point on. I love The Curse of Oak Island TV show, and, even while homeless the last three years, I've tried to catch as many episodes as possible. On last week's show (as I write this, January1, 2021), the coin with a square hole found on the Oak Island was shown to be an ancient Chinese coin, minted sometime between 400 BCE and 900 AD. That one little artifact changes North American history. One explanation is that a pirate, or other ship's crewman in the 1600's, had a 700 year old (or older) coin in their pocket, and dropped it on Oak Island. Or someone who was from, or had visited China, landed on that island, at least 100 years before Leif Erikson, and more and 600 years before Christopher Columbus sailed up to the Caribbean islands in 1492. Either way, it shakes up known North American history. Another amazing artifact leading to an even greater mystery to unravel.
In 1976, when I was 10-years-old, Mr. Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, hosted the show In Search Of, which is when the mainstream media of the time, finally, started looking into many of the best known odd, historical, crypto-zoological, and paranormal mysteries of the world. There were a ton of people interested in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, alien abduction stories, and other out-of-the-mainstream mysteries in the world in the 1970's. While none of these mysteries was solved on that show, the crew looked into all of these things in a solid and interesting way, for the time period. In Search Of , which ran for seven seasons, was a must watch for me as a kid.
Last night, chilling out alone on New Year's Eve 2020, I dozed off around 9:30 pm, and woke up again around 11:00 pm, when Expedition Unknown with Josh Gates was on. I love that show. Every weird adventure, Josh and his insane crew, travel wherever needed, and always break some new ground on each mystery, even if they don't completely solve it. Plus he's hilarious, which is cool, too. The show playing up to midnight last night was one I hadn't seen. It was about a man in Boston who thought he had found the location of one of the 12 treasures buried by Byron Preiss in 1982, who left the clues to find them in his book, The Secret.
I first heard of The Secret on Expedition Unknown while living in Richmond, Virginia in 2018, and have been intrigued by it ever since. In the show I saw last night, the man in Boston, with Josh Gates and the crew shooting video, found the the key in the third of the 12 treasures to be discovered. Before the Boston treasure, the previous two were found in Chicago and Cleveland, in 1983 and 2004. Nine of The Secret treasures are still waiting to be found. If you find one, you turn in the key in the treasure, and get a gemstone worth about $1,000 (in 1982). You also become part of a very elite treasure hunting club, one of the six people who have worked to find the three treasures so far. If you like visual and historical-based puzzles, check out The Secret.
So I rang in the year 2021 having just watched a show about real guy solving a treasure hunt, to find a real treasure. I started this blog, Steve Emig Adventuring, back in June, 2020, when my old blog hit 100,000 page views. I started this blog to head in a new direction, and to starting looking into a lot of these historical mysteries, interesting locations, and weird things in our world. We're technically still in lockdown mode here in Los Angeles county right now, but there's a lot I can do in the blog right now, without actually traveling much. As we work past the horrible pandemic we're all dealing with right now, I plan to look at a whole bunch of these interesting locations, and weird mysteries, compile info, and share them with all of you. So that's my idea with this blog, and it's time to really get the idea going.
2020 is out the door. 2021 is here, let's go explore!
Chris Lashua in the back, and Eddie Fiola, up front, synchro wedge ramps stalls. Whistler, British Columbia, Summer of 1986. This photo ran in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine. My photo.
When I started publishing my first BMX freestyle zine in September of 1985, I had just moved from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California. My reason for starting the zine was to find and meet the other Bay Area riders, like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and the Curb Dogs, and Robert Peterson and the Skyway team. It worked, I became a part of the Golden Gate Park/Bay area freestyle scene. I became the zine guy of that scene, and 11 issues of my San Jose Stylin' zine landed me a job at FREESTYLIN' magazine. In less than a year, I went from some freestyle kid in Idaho to part of the BMX/freestyle industry. Honestly, it still blows my mind that happened. From 1985 until now, I've shot photos of freestylers. Not thousands of photos, and not many really good ones, but I shot a bunch. The photos in this post are three of my better early photos that got published one place or another. These were all shot with my Pentax ME Super 35 mm camera. I was never a great photographer, by any means, but I snapped a pretty good shot now and then.
Dave Vanderspek, haulin' ass on his GPV. Palm Springs Tramway GPV race and ramp jam, 1987. My photo. This photo ran in FREESTYLIN', BMX Action, and Homeboy magazines. My photo.
Working at the AFA in 1987, AFA founder Bob Morales set me to work producing freestyle videos, which led to a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company, in DEcember 1987. In 1988, I shot a bit of footage with their S-VHS camera, and became the staff cameraman in 1989. At that time, we shot video on huge, broadcast quality, Sony Betacam cameras, that cost $50,000 each. But the surge in technology was making consumer cameras much better, and less expensive. In 1990, I got myself an RCA S-VHS camera, and started shooting footage on my own.
From 1990 to 2007, I was shooting video. I self produced a video called The Ultimate Weekend in 1990, and shot a lot of the footage used in the first two S&M Bikes videos, Feel my leg muscles... I'm a racer, and 44 Something. I shot sporadically after that, and had footage from the P.O.W. House, Sheep Hills, and a whole bunch of contest footage, from 1997 to 2007. I had dozens of top pro riders, and things like Todd Lyons doing a handplant over a sub box in La Jolla in 1992 (93?), Spike Jonze jumping, to footage of Cory Nastazio, Chris Duncan, and Stephen Murray at Sheep Hills in the late 90's. I had Dave Mirra doing under vert 540's as a kid, footage of Gary Laurent doing a barrel roll in 2000, to riders like Ryan Nyquist, and even Scotty Cranmer in Core Tour dirt jumping contests in 2006-07.
In other words, I had one of the best raw footage collections in the BMX world from the early 90's, and some good footage up to 2007. But I was a taxi driver in the 2000's, a business that went to hell because of computer technology. I wound up homeless, and ended up taking my family's offer to go stay in North Carolina for a while, where they lived. I'd never lived in North Carolina, but my parents and my sister's family landed there. I planned to go for a few weeks, maybe a few months, in late 2008, as the economy was crashing into the Great Recession. Before I flew to NC, my mom planned to loan me about $150 to pay my back storage unit payments, and to get my Mac Powerbook out of a pawn shop, and have them shipped to me by friends. With those, I could start working on a documentary about BMX freestyle.
On the left is a mug shot of Mike Dominguez, and on the right is my photo of Eddie Fiola, with a footplant at the back of the Pipe Bowl, Pipeline Skatepark, 1987. These are two covers of the AFA newsletter in 1987. I was the editor/photographer of the AFA newsletter for most of 1987, and Bob Morales and I changed the name to American Freestyle, because it sounded cooler.
Long story short, I wound up stuck in North Carolina, I couldn't find a job, and when I asked my mom to loan me that money, she said, "Oh, we don't have money for that." I lost one of the best collections of BMX freestyle raw footage because I couldn't scrape up $150. I wound up losing everything I had from my BMX life, and everything else I owned,in the move to North Carolina.
I had well over 200 BMX magazines, beginning in late 1982, and including a complete set of FREESTYLIN' magazines. I had a collection of 40 to 60 BMX zines, going back to 1985. I had all my master tapes of the videos I produced, and I had 50 to 60 hours of raw footage that had never been used in any video, from 1990 to 2007. I also had my freestyle video collection, on VHS and DVD, including the copy of Headfirst Eddie Roman gave me personally. In other words, I had a pretty cool collection, and enough raw footage to make one or more BMX freestyle documentaries. That's exactly what I planned to do, when I got back on my feet financially. The dream of making a really cool BMX documentary, or maybe 3 or 4 docs on different scenes, kept me going though some really tough times in the late 90's and early 2000's. Some day, I knew I would put together an epic doc with my footage. Suddenly, in early December 2008, it was all gone, along with my Dyno, race bike, the last bike I rode daily.
I went into a deep depression, a near suicidal depression. I was stuck in a tiny town in a state I never wanted to move to, and I couldn't even find a crappy job. I'd just lost the dream of making a freestyle documentary, the thing hat had helped me survive several tough years leading up to that point. The one thing I did have was my parents' computer in the room I stayed in. I barely ever got on computers before that, I was a total Luddite. I'd bought a Mac Powerbook, and was trying to teach myself to edit video with Final Cut, but I never got online with that laptop. That was gone, too. I had avoided learning much about computers. I had published about 25 posts on a crappy taxi driver blog, but that was it. I knew next to nothing about computers or the internet in late 2008.
All I had left from 21 years of riding my BMX bike nearly every day, and several years working in and around the bike/skate industries, was memories, and my Haro two finger, brake lever key chain. So I decided to write a blog about my time working at FREESTYLIN' magazine. The FREESTYLIN' book, published by Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Spike Jonze, working wiht Nike,had come out a few months earlier. I wasn't even mentioned, not even as a dork or a zine guy. So I decided I'd write maybe 20 or 30 posts about my time there. It wasn't about revenge, it was more like, "Hey, I worked there too, for a little while." I didn't know if anyone would ever read them. Then I'd flip a coin. Heads, I 'd hitch hike back to California, tails, I'd commit suicide. Like I said, I was REALLY depressed after getting trapped in North Carolina, and I'd completely lost touch with anyone in the BMX world, while driving a taxi, except for a few of the Sheep Hills/S&M guys, who'd call me for rides now and then. To me, the "world wide web" or the internet, was a big black hole of cyberspace, and things just went there and disappeared.
So, with nothing left but memories, I began to write little stories of things I saw happen while working at Wizard Publications in 1986. They were my stories, but mostly tales of what I saw at some cool, behind-the-scenes moment, or big happenings in the world of freestyle. Much to my surprise, after about 20 posts, I got contacted by China Krys Darrington, who we know as Krys Dauchy in the 80's. I'd only met her once, but she started emailing me after reading posts. Then Maurice Meyer contacted me, then a few other people. Connecting with old freestyle friends, and people I didn't even know back then, saved me from completely losing hope while in North Carolina. Since I couldn't find a job for years, I had a lot of time to write weird little stories of my BMX freestyle days. I wound up writing over 200 posts on my FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales blog. Then, in 2009, I started Freestyle BMX Tales blog, so I could tell other stories, those that didn't happen at Wizard Publications. In a couple of years, I wrote over 500 posts on that blog. So that's how the original Freestyle BMX Tales blog came to be, 2009-2012.
My dad had a stroke in March of 2012, and died in August of that year. A month or two after his death, I got really depressed, not just because of his death, but at my life in general. One night, I deleted all my blogs, over 700 BMX posts, and many other ones. I immediately regretted deleting my blogs, and eventually started a new blog. Since 2013, I've written several hundred other BMX freestyle related blog posts, across about five different blogs. I did another version of Freestyle BMX Tales on Wordpress, and then switched back to Blogger, starting yet another Freestyle BMX Tales. I later wrote BMX posts on Steve Emig: The White Bear blog, and now on Steve Emig Adventuring. I didn't just write freestyle blog posts, people read my posts. My top few blogs have landed over 370,000 total page views, up to this point. People are still reading those older blog posts.
Since I was able to finally get off the streets, and escape homelessness, a month ago, I decided it's time to write the first Freestyle BMX Tales ebook. It's coming out in the next month or so. In it, I'll compile a bunch of the best blog posts, all in one place. I'm also writing a bunch of new sections, to tie the different stories together. So that's the main thing I'm working on right now, and I'm hoping to have it available, as a downloadable ebook, in early January 2021.
Since I've written so many posts, I quickly realized that it will have to be two or three ebooks, and each one will be 150 to 200 pages. For about the price of a cup of coffee, you'll be able to get my best stories, and carry them with you and read them whenever you like. This first ebook will go from my beginning in BMX in 1982, into the first big wave of BMX freestyle, to 1987.
So that's what I'm up to. Keep an eye here, or on my Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest posts and tweets, to find out when the ebook launches..
