America's "Nazca Lines?"- The Blythe Intaglios

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. 

 

 

The Great Wall of San Francisco? Maybe the Chinese came to America before Columbus

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.

We need a little of The Notorious RBG right about now...

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. 

My 2021 Financial Predictions

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.

 

 

The investment winners of 2020

 

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. 

 

 

New Year, New Adventures

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!

How Freestyle BMX Tales blog came to be

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.. 

 

Creative Life: 12/16/2020- The Season's upon us...

Honestly, this looks way more fun than Christmas in my family growing up.  I'm sure plenty of you have similar backgrounds.  I hated all holidays growing up, they were always times of heavily elevated drama, where I wished I could hide under a rock until they were over.  

We are now 9 days from Christmas, and 15 days from the end of 2020, the year that pretty much everybody has been complaining about.  Yes, it's been crazy, but in my life, 2020 just barely makes it in the top ten worst years of the 21st century.  Actually, since I have a room to live in for the time being, I think 2020 is down to about the 17th worst year of the last 20.  Seriously, most of the past 20 years have been far worse than 2020 in my life.  2020 was nuts in March and April, but overall, it's been more fun that most.  

By the beginning of September 2020, I had been homeless, at some level (there are many), for 12 of the last 21 years, and lived fully on the streets for a total 4 full years.  I was working, full time, or well beyond "full time" (40 hours/week), for about 8 of those 12 years.  No drugs.  No alcohol.  I had a bunch of other bullshit going on.  I did struggle with depression for quite a while, but that was because I was living in North Carolina (aka Hell), I couldn't find any job, and living with my mom.  My family has come to the conclusion that my mom probably suffers from severe Borderline Personality Disorder, and a few other lesser disorders.  To put that into context, if Satan had an evil mother-in-law that drove him crazy, she would have severe borderline disorder.  So the most depressing time of my life, by far, was when I had a free place to live.  People think homelessness is one of the worst things that can happen to a person.  Living homeless really sucks, but there are worse fates.  Being a homeless struggling artist was much better than being a lazy guy sitting on her couch watching bad game shows, getting nagged, belittled, and berated all day, every day.  Crazy as it sounds, becoming homeless was a step up.   

Being the futurist/economic geek that I am, I knew the economy was going to crash in 2020, I predicted the February stock crash in a blog post in late January.  I have blogged about it for a couple of years.  But I didn't know Covid-19 would be the black swan event that did it.  I did not see a 100 year pandemic coming.  Bill Gates made that call a few years ago, and I wasn't listening.  

As a homeless guy in the L.A. area last spring, myself, and all homeless people, were basically left outside to die, when that first shutdown happened.  The fast food places and the library, things my life depended on, were shut down.  Nearly all of the public restrooms I (and many other homeless people and traveling working people) used every day, closed.  The places I charged my phone (when I could afford to turn it on), and my laptop, closed.  When 90% of the places you go to the bathroom close down, life gets real sketchy in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.  

I spent 7 months, during a 100 year pandemic, sitting in obscure places to charge my laptop, then taking a bus somewhere else to pirate wifi, so I could blog, and do social media, to try and keep selling some artwork, to stay alive.  

At one point, I got really sick, went to the hospital, and spent a day and a half in a covid room, because I was suspected to have the virus.  I had no contact with anyone in my life then.  So If I would have died, I would have simply disappeared.  It turned out to be a bad bacterial infection, showing up as pneumonia and cellulitis.  Bad, but much better than having the virus.  I kept going, and with a lot of help from some people who bought some artwork, and from food stamps, I survived.  The great irony, that we began to figure out months later, is that us homeless people, living outside, were actually far less likely to catch Covid than most "normal" people, stuck in the house with their families.  Going to a shelter, became one of the most dangerous things to do.  Like everybody's grandma used to say, "The Lord works in mysterious ways." 

Here's the crazy thing, I finally qualified for pandemic unemployment insurance, and now have some money to work with.  That allowed me to get an expensive "cheap" motel room, and gives me a shot at getting my life back on track.  A shot.  It's not even close to a slam dunk.  At a time when nearly every small business in this country is struggling to simply survive, I have to start, build, and get a small business running, in 90 days or so, and make enough money to live off of, immediately.  That's about how long I can keep a roof over my head, unless I find a better scenario.  

In 21 years of struggling in and out of homelessness, this is actually the best situation I've been in since 2000.  My family wouldn't loan me enough money to have a fighting chance at making a decent living when I was back east.  They were not obligated to, but it just kept me struggling for those 11 years.  Many friends have helped me out, but at a level that helped me survive a bit longer and keep fighting.  No one with the means to help me really start over, wanted to loan me enough money to do that.  And I get it, I've been struggling for a long time, and couldn't really explain why.  A lot of really crazy shit has happened, and for most of the last 21 years, simply surviving was the best I could manage.  I should be dead... seriously... like 6 or 7 times over.  I've survived a near head on car crash, 3 meetings with mountain lions, and 3 or 4 serious cases of cellulitis/MRSA infection.  Instead of being dead, I'm fat, my teeth are all broken, and I have sold artwork to 6 of the 7 continents somehow.  That's a win, under the circumstances.  I'm still alive a kickin'. 

I can tell you right now, 2021 will be crazier, on a Big Picture/economic level, than 2020 was.  But the vaccine will eventually get us past the pandemic era (I'm guessing by September/October next year, not March).  That will make day to day life much better for most people.  A lot of people will be a lot worse off financially, then.  A much smaller number of people will be much better off.  Most people will still be struggling paycheck to paycheck, and a lot more of those "paychecks" will be government checks.

There are times when the Universe, or Life itself, puts you through the ringer, for an extended period of time.  This happens in many different ways to different people.  In the creative world, we often call this "paying your dues."  Life kicked my ass for about 20 years, just to see if I was serious about being a creative guy, and about trying to do something worthwhile (by my standards) in the world.  Call it an extended test by Life (or the Universe) itself.  Surviving nine months, living on the streets, during a 100 year pandemic, was my PhD thesis in survival.   

Then life said, "OK, you've proven you're one crazy, determined, creative motherfucker, now get to work!"  For three weeks now, I've been decompressing from that extended test by life, and I'm now working on publishing myfirst (of many, I hope) ebooks.  This one's about the Old School BMX days in the 1980's.  Many other ebooks, and other creative works, will follow, I hope.  

I will, in all likelihood, spend Christmas alone, very happily, in a small motel room, eating too much, watching some TV, and working on the next ebook, or maybe a drawing.  To me, after the last couple of decades, that's an awesome Christmas.  I will keep creating words, drawings, videos, and other things, as long as I can.  I have a mile long list of potential projects in my head.  That's what I do.  Since I passed Life's extended test, I think Life may help me out a bit more from now on.  We'll see.

I'd like to say a huge thanks to everyone who has helped me out, in one way or another, several people bought drawings, others loaned me a bit at some point.  I owe some of you some money, and I'm working to create a steady income, so I can do just that, as soon as possible.  If I pay everyone right now, then I'm homeless again in a couple weeks, and hitting you all up to buy little  BMX drawings, for food money.  And let's face it, nobody wants that.  Ebooks are much cheaper, and we all get more bang for our buck.  And I have a shitload of stories, and thoughts on many subjects.  I'm still up for commission drawings, but I've shifted focus to writing at the moment.

So that's where I'm at right now.  Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kickin' Kwanzaa, Freaky Festivus, whatever.  Do the best to enjoy the holidays, and I know most people will ring in the New Year with more stoke than ever.  Most of all, do something creative when you can, and be cool to other humans, even the douchebags, I think their time is running out soon, anyhow.

My accidental attempt at a Z-Rim world speed record

My story: My accidental attempt at a Z-rim world speed record

By the spring of 1985, I was a year out of high school, working nights at a big Mexican restaurant called Chi-Chi's (Spanish for "tits"), and riding as much as possible.  I was riding with Jay Bickel a lot, and we were doing occasional shows and local parades as the Critical Condition Stunt Team, sharing BMX freestyle with the people of the Boise area.  

For some reason, my dad got laid off that Spring.  It probably wasn't because I had a party at his boss' house over Christmas, while I was house sitting.  But my mom blamed me for my dad losing his job at times.  The company was downsizing, so that's probably the real reason.  Whatever the reason, my dad found a new job in San Jose, California.  My family moved there in late Spring 1985.  I rented a room at my best friend Darrin's family's house for the summer, and went back to work as manager of the Boise Fun Spot, a tiny amusement park in Julia Davis park, by the Boise River, in downtown. 

In August of 1985, the Fun Spot closed, and we packed up the carnival rides for the winter, and my job ended.  I stayed another week or so, at Darrin's house.  I packed my car, a 1971, shit brown, Pontiac Bonneville, for the trip to San Jose.  That car was about the size of an aircraft carrier.  I had so much crap, that I completely packed the huge car, with my Skyway T/A lying on a bunch of other stuff in the trunk.  I only had to take the pedals off and turn the bars to fit it in, the trunk was so huge.

I got up early that morning, said goodbye to my longtime friends, and headed west out of Boise.  Less than an hour into my trip, on a small four lane section of highway, my Pontiac, powered by its gigantic Oldsmobile 455 engine, headed up a long, steep grade.  I remember seeing a sign that it was a 6% grade, about 5 miles long.  That's steep, if the grade was much longer, they would have built a runaway truck ramps on the downhill side.  No problem for my big V-8 car.  Or so I thought.  About a quarter mile from the top of that big grade, my car lost power, much to my surprise.  

There were no cars around, the road was empty, as I coasted to a stop, already freaking out.  I tried for a while to get my car started again, but it wouldn't start.  I got out and popped the huge hood, wondering if the car was overheating, but that wasn't the case.  A couple of cars passed by, in the 15 minutes or so I sat there.  I was all alone, in the middle of fucking nowhere, with a dead car.  I'm a horrible mechanic, but there was no outward sign of something wrong.  So I decided to get my bike out, and ride back to a tiny little village I passed a few miles earlier, and find a tow truck. There were no cell phones in those days, so riding to get help, or hitchhiking were the only options.  

I popped the trunk, got my bike out, and screwed on my pedals.  It was a cool, sunny morning that was beginning to warm up.  I was wearing my Levi's 501's and a T-shirt, I didn't bother with a helmet or any safety gear, which was packed somewhere in the car.  It was a steep hill I'd just come up, but I just planned to ride the brakes down the long grade, then ride the 2-3 miles of flat ground to the tiny town after that.  I checked to make sure that my car was locked, and straddled my Skyway T/A, with red ACS Z-Rims.  For any of you not familiar, Z-Rims were spoked wheels, with made from a plastic composite.  They were designed to bend, and then snap back into shape.  In reality, they bent a little, they were never true, and always wobbled a bit.  If you were building a bike to go fast down a hill back then, Z-Rims are the last type of wheels you would want to use, because they were wobbly to begin with.

The grade was so steep that I just put my feet on the pedals, and started coasting.  I didn't pedal once... for about 5 miles.  Seriously, five miles.  Within a couple hundred yards, I was going fast.  Within a quarter mile, I was going faster than I'd ever gone in my life on a bicycle, easily over 40 miles per hour.  I just kept gaining speed.  Not too far down the hill, I grabbed both brakes to slow down, and I couldn't even come close to stopping.  So I just hung on and hauled ass down the hill.  I honestly had no idea how fast I was going, I just knew it was really fast.  But I did pass a few cars that were heading up the hill, and every time the driver did a double take as they saw me race by going the other direction.  Again, this was the end of August, 1985.  There weren't many road bike riders in rural Idaho back then.  A guy on a BMX bike bombing down a hill in the middle of nowhere probably seemed as crazy as seeing an alien. 

If you were riding in 1986, you may remember a magazine cover with a couple of riders bombing down a hill on weird little bikes.  That was the July 1986 cover of BMX Action, which means that photo of the GPV racers was shot about 8 or 9 months after my downhill run from my broken car.  That article was the first time most of us heard of GPV's, or Gravity Powered Vehicles.  The GPV idea was started by CW freestyle team manager Harold "McGoo" McGruther and freestyler Ceppie Maes.  They were trying one idea, and got sidetracked, wound up making a bike out of spare parts, with no chain, built to coast down big hills, and go fast through gnarly corners.  McGoo was the best known industry guy in BMX, having talked on camera in some BMX Plus videos, and been talked about in magazines.  McGoo was the official BMX industry comedian, a former B pro racer, and a hilarious guy to hang out with, in those days.  He probably still is, I just haven't seen him in years.  He's a guy with a good, sacastic wisecrack for any occasion, and always kept us laughing.

Word got around the BMX industry in Southern California of the weekend and evening hill bombing sessions on GPV's, and a few informal races were held.  Word of GPV's soon made it to NorCal, where Dave Vanderspek and some of the Curb Dogs started bombing down hills up there.  By 1987 and 1988, a few semi-official races were also held, and GPV's even made it on TV a few times.  

I happened to go the Palm Springs Tramway Road GPV race, and ramp jam, in the summer of 1987.  I didn't have a GPV, I just went to shoot photos and hang out.  The desolate road up into the mountains road, just outside of Palm Springs, served up a steep section of pavement, two lanes wide, and the race was 2 1/2 or 3 miles long, with very few turns.  It was also the first GPV race where a lot of the riders had fairings on their bikes.  You can see highlights of that race on YouTube in the Vision Street Wear video Mondo Vision (search "Mondo Vision 1989 Vision Street Wear").  

While aeronautical engineer, and the guy who made most of the fairings, Dan Hannebrink won the race, the craziest thing that day was done pro BMX racer Tommy Brackens.  Near the end of the course, Tommy passed the camera motorcycle... in a turn.  The camera bike was doing 85 mph at the time, so Tommy was doing at least 90... on a 20 inch bike made from spare parts.  I know this, because I later worked with Pat Wallace, the cameraman facing backwards on that motorcycle.  He told that story for years, it blew his mind.  My point is that GPV's with fairings, on a really big, long hill could reach 85-90 miles per hour, no problem.  Maybe more.  

I don't know how fast I went down that steep grade, on that August morning, with no helmet or safety gear, in September of 1985.  Years later, I've ridden down hills at 45 mph, on a mountain bike with an accurate speedometer, and that's pretty fast.  In 1985, on my Skyway T/A, I was going a lot faster than 45 mph.  

With Google Maps, today, I found the site of where that steep grade was.  On Route 55, 30 or 35 miles west of Boise, I crossed the Snake River, and passed through the tiny town of Marsing.  About a mile later, I turned left onto Route 95, and about another mile up 95, the steep grade began.  I remember it as a 6% grade that was about five miles long.  What blew my mind today, is that I compared that to the crazy Palm Springs Tramway Road, site of the 90+ mph hour run by Tommy Brackens and others.  The hill I rode down was probably twice as long, and nearly as steep, as the Tramway Road.  

What I remember of that downhill ride was that I couldn't stop, I couldn't even come close to slowing my bike down to a stop, once I got going.  I also remember that my wheel bearings just made this loud, scratchy, almost grinding sound, all the way down the hill.  I had loose ball, retainered bearings, and I did not change the lube out very often.  I also remember that I hit the bottom of the long grade, and rode across a long flat area, maybe 1/4 mile or more long, then went up a small hill, maybe 50 to 100 feet high.  Even at the top of that little hill, while grabbing both brakes, after coasting across the flat area, I was still going to fast to pedal.  I'm serious.  I then coasted down the other side of the small hill, hit the mile long flat area, and finally slowed down to where I had to pedal.  

I literally coasted about five miles, without pedaling a single time.  I'm not kidding.  I think I honestly was going around 60 miles per hour, maybe 70... on Z-Rims.  Wearing Levi's and a T-shirt, all alone, in the middle of nowhere.  It was the single scariest thing I've ever done on a bike.  OK, I never did anything very crazy by pro BMX standards, I couldn't air, and didn't jump big jumps.  But that was one scary fucking ride down that hill.  And now that I figured out exactly where it is, I want to go back there some time, and see just how gnarly that hill is.  I don't want to ride down it again though.  Maybe I'll see if one of my old Idaho BMX friends can check it out, Shannon Gillette, Dave Sandidge, or Clint Davies, and see just how crazy that hill looks today.

I wound up getting my car towed into Marsing, by a couple of the redneckiest guys I've ever met, in the single sketchiest tow truck I've ever seen.  I was riding with them in the tow truck, and the driver tried to downshift, while pulling my huge, packed Pontiac, while going 60 down the hill.  He popped it out of gear, but couldn't get it into another gear.  We were coasting about 75, (I could see the speedometer), when the second guy freaked, "Good lord Earl, get it in gear."  About then, the driver finally ground it into gear, and got control of the tow truck again.  They towed me to their shop, and popped the hood to find the problem.

  I spent most of the day wandering around, while the mechanics worked on my car.  I crossed the Snake River bridge, and climbed a hill called Lizard Butte.  Then I wandered back to the garage.  One of the mechanics was standing under my hood, where the front of my engine had been.  I knew that was a bad sign.  It turned out my timing chain had broken.  About $250 and 6 or 7 hours later, I was back on my way to San Jose.  I spent that night in Nevada, and made it to my parents' apartment the next evening.  That began the NorCal phase of my BMX freestyle life.

This is the best photo I ever took in the 80's.  It's Dave Vanderspek, at the Palm Springs Tramway GPV race in 1987.  It was only the second time I ever tried taking panning photos, and I just got really lucky on this one.  As fast as it looks like he's going, I have to confess, I shot this photo about 200 yards below the starting line, and Dave was going maybe 25 or 30 mph in this photo.  I just matched his speed well, and had the aperture set right, to give the photo this high speed look.  Another minute into this run, and Dave really was going as fast as this photo makes it seem he's going.  This photo just summed up that day so well, and it was Dave Vanderspek, a favorite of my former co-workers at Wizard Publications.  So this photo ran in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy magazines.  Sometimes you just get lucky, and this photo was pure luck.  And Vander, just being himself. 
 

Solving a historical mystery in New Mexico in 1980

 

In an obscure part of the New Mexico desert, between Carlsbad and Roswell, there is a huge swastika built of earthen mounds.  That's what you're looking at above.  This swastika is 100 yards across, and the mounds it's built of are about 8 to 10 feet high.  The faint circle you see around it is 200 or 250 yards across.  How do I know this?  I was there in 1980.  I've looked for this several times on Google Maps, and finally found it last week.  Forty years later, this huge mound still exists.

This story starts with my dad, Tom Emig, finding a new job in 1980.  My parents, myself, and my sister all grew up in Ohio, though we moved nearly every year when I was a kid.  My dad was a draftsman/engineer at Plymouth Locomotive Works in early 1980, in Plymouth, Ohio.  Early that year, rumors started circulating that the factory might be sold, or maybe moved to a new location.  My dad quietly started looking for a new job.  In late spring, my dad found a job at a mining equipment company in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  We moved there over the summer, a huge change for all of us.  From green Ohio farm country, we suddenly lived in a mid-sized city surrounded by desert in three directions, and mountains not far to the west.  From a predominantly white Midwest state, we moved to a town that was 70% Latino.  Suddenly we had to live in a world of guacamole and sopapillas, so it wasn't all bad.  My dad was excited after going to an interview there, the My mom, sister, and myself were pretty hesitant, not sure what to expect.  

My sister Cheri, my dad Tom Emig, and me (Steve Emig), early 1970's.  This is the closest photo I have to 1980.  Photo by Kathy Emig.

As my dad got used to his new job, the rest of us spent a couple weeks in a hotel, and then got settled into a cool house in the hot summer Our new house was a block from the muddy Pecos River that runs through Carlsbad.  The joke about the Pecos is that it was "to thick to drink, to thin to plow."  But swimming in the river was a great way to deal with the scorching summer.  Somehow, there were both gar and rainbow trout in that river, which is an odd combination. 

As the summer began to cool into fall, my dad made friends with the guys at work.  In Carlsbad, a lot of people spent their weekends doing something out in the desert.  A lot of people drove four wheel drives or rode motorcycles.  Spelunking, or exploring caves, was also really popular.  The area is known for Carlsbad Caverns, a huge cave system and national park.  Some people went shooting and camping, others looked for Indian ruins to find arrowheads or paint pictures of the old adobe walls.  I turned 14 that summer, and loved going out to explore the desert on the weekends with my dad and his friends from work.  It was such a different outdoor experience from wandering the woods of Ohio.

Again, this was 1980, long before Google maps, the internet, and easy ways to find cool places to explore in the desert.  So many people in the area had a trick.  They'd go to an obscure county government office, and buy a big book of each county, called the Soil Conservation Survey.  For $4, we could get a phone book sized set of aerial maps of the whole county.  Normally, these weird government documents were used by farmers, or mining engineers, to find good land to farm, or outcroppings where minerals may be found.  But in Carlsbad, average people scoured these aerial photos, looking for places where there might be caves, cool places to go four-wheeling, camping, hunting, or even to find Indian ruins.  

I think it was late summer that one of my dad's co-workers found something weird in the aerial maps.  There are almost no trees in those thousands of square miles of desert, so pretty small things, like old buildings and ruins, showed up well.  One of my dad's friends found a huge, perfect circle, about 250 yards in diameter.  Inside of it was a smaller, 100 yard diameter circle, and there seemed to be a small house or cabin, right in the very center of the circles.  But there were no roads, not even Jeep trails, going to the house.  There nearest rough trail was over a mile away.  I forget that guy's name, I'll call him Bill. Bill showed the mystery circle to the guys in the engineering department, a pretty smart group, and asked if anyone had ideas what the circle was.  Everybody had thoughts, but no one was sure.  

They talked about it at work for about a week, then Bill and my dad decided to drive Bill's big Chevy Blazer out there on Saturday, to find out what it was.  I was asked if I wanted to go.  "Heck yeah," I thought.  It seemed like a cross between an archeological expedition and a Scooby-Doo mystery.  I couldn't wait to get out there. Bill picked us up about 5:00 am that Saturday, hoping to get out that place in early morning, before the midday heat.  We headed out of town, Bill driving, with my dad navigating, using a road map and the aerial map together.  Oh yeah, there was no GPS back in those olden days, just maps.  The soil conservation survey didn't label roads, so my dad had to match them up, which got harder and harder as we got out into the desert on Jeep trails.  After a couple hours of wandering around, we got to a barbed wire fence that we thought was about a mile from the center of the circle.  

Out in the desert, there's an unwritten rule that I learned in New Mexico, and have found holds true all over the west.  The rule is about gates in fences.  If a gate is open, leave it open, if it's closed, close it after you go through.  The reason for this is cattle.  Ranchers owned cattle that wandered all over the desert, and the gates kept the cattle in the area they were supposed to be in.  You NEVER cut or drive over a fence, whether it's barbed wire, chain link, wooden, whatever.  So Bill drove cross country, parallel to the fence, looking for a gate to cross to the other side.  There are several types of desert gates, but most of them are just two or three strands of barbed wire, with a thick wooden post or rod on the end.  The post fits through loops on the other end.  

We found one of the most unusual kinds of gates, it had tall wooden posts on both sides, each about six inches in diameter.  There was a high cross post, and an actual metal gate.  So my dad got out, opened the gate (they're rarely locked), and Bill began to drive his big Chevy Blazer through the gate.  But the gate was too narrow.  Even with the rear view mirrors turned in, the Blazer was too wide to fit through the solid gate posts.  

We weren't even sure this was the exact area, since we'd wandered around so much, along the maze of Jeep trails.  Again, no GPS in those days to find an exact position, so we drove the rest of the way around the area, and that was the only gate.  It was getting hot by that point, so we headed away, wandered a few more trails, and then headed home.  

 

That next Monday at work, Bill and my dad told the other guys the story.  One of the younger guys, named Bobbie, said he could get to the spot.  They joked back and forth, and finally bet Bobbie $10 he couldn't get there.  Bobbie was a former local rodeo cowboy, a motocross rider, and just a really funny character.  Most notably, Bobbie stuttered, especially when he got excited or pissed off.  Bobbie took the bet, and said he'd take a photo, from the little house in the middle of the mysterious circle.  The mysterious desert circle was the talk of the office all week.  Often the guys would scour the aerial photos during their lunch hour.  A few miles away from the mysterious circle, Bill found a second set of concentric circles, again with a little cabin in the middle.  My dad borrowed Bill's soil conservation book, and brought it home, and he and I tried to figure out the best way to get to the mystery circle, and looked for more. We didn't go out that weekend.  But Bobbie did.  

Bobbie was known for misadventures, and for telling exaggerated stories.  The other guys often gave him a hard time.  Then he'd get frustrated, and start to stutter, and then they'd make fun of him for stuttering.  That was life in those days.  Much to everyone's surprise, Bobbie walked in Monday morning with a description of the mystery circle.  He told them he'd taken a photo at the little cabin, and the photo was getting developed.  Bobbie drove a small, Chevy Luv pick-up, much  narrower, side to side, than Bill's big Blazer.  It was tight, but he cruised right through the gate, and soon found the little building.  The circles were small mounds, about a foot to a foot and a half high.  The little building in the center wasn't an old house or a cabin, it was just a little shack, and it didn't seem to have ever been lived in.  Then he got to the crazy part. There were rusty pieces of metal scattered around.  He said some of them looked like parts of bombs.  The mystery circle seemed to be an old bomb target for Air Force bombers.  

So the mystery suddenly became more mysterious.  The closest Air Force base was the old base in Roswell, 90 miles north of Carlsbad, and maybe 100 miles from the target.  But no one had ever heard of a bombing range anywhere near Carlsbad.  Again, this was a time long before the internet and today's mass information society.  Since I mentioned Roswell, now the UFO capitol of the world, I need to explain that no one in Carlsbad had heard of the Roswell UFO crash then.  The book that made that story popular, The Roswell Incident, by Charles Berlitz, came out early the next year, in 1981.  Nobody really talked about UFO's back then, except for a few really crazy people.  So Roswell was known mostly for the old Air Force Base, now famous for its role in the UFO story.  

 

The guys in my dad's office started arguing.  Since Bobbie was known for tall tales, a few guys didn't believe him.  By the end of the week, Bobbie got the photos back, and shut them all up.  He had a couple of photos of his truck in front of the little shack.  But he didn't think to pick up the metal, and since no one had heard of a bombing range, the bomb target idea was suspect.  

My dad was always up for a puzzle or a mystery, so he decided we should have Bobbie take us out to the target the next weekend.  My dad also went down and bought his own Soil Conservation Survey book.  He started looking through it every night after work.  By then 3 or 4 targets had been found.  So two weeks after our first attempt, we headed out in Bobbie's little Chevy Luv pick-up, to the mystery circle.  Bobbie brought one of his motorcycles along, a Honda 90 dirt bike, a good little bike for tooling around cross country in the desert.  We headed out super early again, and it was light as we got to the spot.  Bobbie squeaked his truck through the gate, and drove us right up to the little shack.  We got out, and started looking around.  Soon we found the rusty, bent scraps of metal, just a piece here, a piece there.  Some looked kind of like pieces of small bombs, just like Bobbie had told the guys.  I wandered one direction, my dad wandered another, and Bobbie got his motorcycle out of the truck, and putted off across the desert.  

This is a standard, World War II era , 100 pound practice bomb.  I pulled this photo off the web, because it gives you a good idea of the size, the light blue color (kind of rusty here), and the stenciled writing on the side.  These bombs didn't explode, they just hit the ground, and often broke apart.  This bomb is all metal.  They were designed to be cheap, so bomber pilots and bombardiers could practice bombing before heading off to war.

Some of the rusty metal scraps looked like twisted pieces of broken oil drum or something.  They were thin pieces of steel, sort of rounded, and broken by some force.  Within minutes we started finding flatter pieces, parts of the square tail section of bombs, like the one in the photo above.  Bobbie was right, the mystery circle appeared to be an old bombing practice range.  This realization led to the obvious question:  Is any of this stuff going to blow up if we touch it?  That first day of looking around, we were pretty worried at first.  But as we found more and more pieces of bombs, we realized these bombs weren't meant to explode.

We soon started finding big hunks of concrete, solid pieces of practice bombs, most were 10-12 inches long, and broken on impact, it seemed.  We collected a few of the best pieces before it got too hot out, an took them home to check out in more detail.  That first day of wandering the old bomb target led to far more questions than answers.  But it provided us with something every man in New Mexico needed: a reason to go wander around the desert every weekend all winter.  Let's face it, guys (and some women) just like to get outside and wander around outdoors.  As a kid from Ohio, I was fascinated by jackrabbits, the huge, long eared critters that were far bigger than Ohio cottontail rabbits.  We even saw pronghorn antelope now and then, off in the distance.  It was just cool to get outside.  I came to love exploring the wide open spaces of the desert that winter.  The dry desert climate keeps man made objects in much better shape for decades, so we never knew what we would find out there.

 

From then on, bomb hunting was our thing.  My dad and I went out with Bobbie, Bill, and my dad's boss, Ron, a couple of weekends a month, looking for practice bombs.  At the time, my dad had this huge collection of military stuff.  My dad was always a pack rat, as we called it then.  If you've ever seen the TV show American Pickers, then you've seen those guys who collect weird stuff that Mike and Frank try to buy.  My dad was one of those collectors.  

 

A few years earlier, my dad worked with a guy who collected Nazi stuff from World War II.  OK, the guy was a crazy racist, but it was an amazing collection.  While my dad totally disagreed with the guy's racist ideology, it inspired him to start collecting American military stuff.  As an avid target shooter, my dad went to gun shows a lot.  But my mom didn't like guns.  So my dad started collecting patches, uniforms, and other things from the American military forces, also found at gun shows.  He never served in the military, but really got into collecting stuff.  By the time we moved to New Mexico, my dad had so many things from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, that he was thinking of opening up a small  museum some day.  Suddenly we had stumbled onto old practice bombs, as well.  So that fit right in, and we became bomb collectors.

 

B-17 Flying Fortress bombers dropping 100 pound bombs during World War II.

For months, over the winter of 1980-1981, we scoured the Soil Conservation Survey book's aerial photos, and ultimately found about 45 of these bomb targets scattered around the desert of south eastern New Mexico.  For most of that time, we thought these targets were for the Air Force base, up at Roswell, 90 miles north of Carlsbad.  On our second or third trip to that first bomb target, we found some big concrete practice bombs that were half buried.  When we pulled them out of the ground, some still had the light blue color, and even stenciled writing on the bottom.  Before long, we found some with dates, 1943 and 1944 mostly.  So we learned the bombs were dropped during World War II.  

We couldn't find any information on who dropped them.  No one, even local historians in Carlsbad, had any idea.  So we just assumed they were dropped from the World War II era bombers in Roswell.  As the winter passed, we found a lot of concrete bombs, some nearly complete, and we found some of the tail sections in good condition, for having sat in the desert for 35 years.  My dad, being an engineer, figured out that there were about 10 different variations of the metal bombs, plus the concrete ones.  The metal practice bombs were filled with gravel, or sometimes sand, to give them the needed weight.  When they hit, they would usually break apart from the force of landing.  

 

My dad also figured out that they had a smoke canister in the tail, and a fuse system.  So some, maybe all, of the bombs would have smoke coming out of them, so the pilots and bombardiers, or maybe a chase plane, could see how close they came to the center of the target.  Piece by piece, my dad figured out the fuse mechanism on the back of the bombs, that would trigger the smoke trail.  Eventually he built a full tail section with the fuse mechanism, and painted it light blue and orange, like the original ones.  He still had that tail section in the early 2000's, but I think he wound up selling it at a garage sale.

A few months into this hobby of finding targets, and then driving through the desert to explore them, Bill found a really crazy target, up near Artesia, about halfway between Carlsbad and Roswell.  One target of the 45 had a huge swastika built on it, so the bombers could actually bomb that huge Nazi symbol.  We finally headed up there with Bill one Saturday.  We left the nearest road, and went cross country, to where we thought the target should be.  Since the huge circles were mounds that were only about 1 1/2 feet high, we looked out the windows for signs of the huge, 100 yard wide swastika.  We came to a long, small hill, that looked like something a rancher built, maybe a watering pond for cattle.  Bill drove along the 8 foot high embankment, as he and my dad scanned the desert for the target, or for practice bomb fragments.  

We came to the end of the embankment, and Bill drove to the left, where there was another embankment, maybe 50 yards away.  We were stumped, we were pretty sure we were in right place, but we couldn't find the target.  As we drove along the second big embankment, it suddenly dawned on me.  "Stop.. let me out!" I shouted.  I caught Dad and Bill by surprise.  Bill thought I was sick, and screeched to a halt, and jumped out of the driver's seat, so I could get out of the back seat.  He didn't want me puking in his Blazer.  I launched out of the Blazer, but instead of throwing up, I ran to the top of the embankment.  My little insight had been right.  I looked around in total amazement.  

My dad and Bill looked up at me, not sure what the hell I was so excited about.  "Come up here!" I yelled.  They both trudged up the 8 foot high embankment... and realized that we were standing on a huge earthen mound, a 100 yard square, giant swastika mound.  The only thing I could compare it to was pictures of the Great Serpent Mound, an ancient Indian mound in Ohio.  I'd seen photos of that when I was a kid in Ohio, but never talked my parents into taking us there.  Suddenly I was standing on a huge mound, that none of us, and apparently no one, knew existed.  The thing was fucking enormous.  It was so big, that when we drove up, we thought it was just the side of a pond or something.  As we drove around it, it dawned on me that the big gap between hills was actually the open part of the swastika.  Seriously, we were all to stoked, we felt a little like Indiana Jones.  We found something no one seemed to know, or at least remember, existed.  

We made a few trips to the giant swastika mound, and we found more variations of the metal practice bombs there, than anywhere.  I think it was that target, which we found in early 1981, that got us more interested in actually finding out the history of the bomb targets.  So our next expedition was to the Carlsbad library.  My dad wandered off into the military history section, and I dove into the old issues of a magazine about New Mexico.  A few hours into the library search, I found an article about a World War II era bomber and navigator training school based in Carlsbad.  We also learned that the Air Force wasn't its own branch then, it was the Army Air Force during World War II.  We wound up finding a couple more magazine articles that filled in some of the details.  We actually talked to a local historian, a friend of one of the librarians, and she had no idea that there had been a bomber and navigator  training base in Carlsbad during World War II.  

Here's the patch of the Carlsbad, Army Air Force, bombardier and navigator training school, from 1943.  I didn't know about this until a few years ago, when I looked it up on the internet.  Now this little piece of history is on the Carlsbad Wikipedia page.  So for me, this was my cool, amateur archeology-type adventure we had when I was in 9th grade.  Every once and a while I'd think about it, and wonder how many other people had found the huge swastika mound in the desert.  As I said above, the book The Roswell Incident, came out in early 1981.  The whole UFO thing wasn't known about while we were wandering around that part of New Mexico.  The supposed Roswell crash site is actually far north of Roswell, which is 45 or 50 miles north of the swastika mound.  But with so many people looking for UFO's since then, I totally expected the mound to be found by someone.  

Over the last few years, I tried to find it on Google Maps/Earth a few times.  But I couldn't find it, and figured it had been bulldozed or something.  Then, last week, when I had a little more time to spend online, I tried again.  Much to my surprise, I found the huge swastika mound.  It still exists!  It was 3 or 4 miles from where I remembered it to be.  Maybe sometime later this year I'll get back out there, with a video camera, and check it out again.  That's the mound in the still, at the top of this article, as seen on Google Maps.  I called this new blog Steve Emig Adventuring, because I want to spend more time telling a few old stories, like this one, and more time in the future looking into other historical things, and weird mysteries like this one.  

Just to be clear, since this is a post about a huge swastika mound, I'm NOT a white supremacist.  I think that whole ideology is bullshit, and I'm 100% against racism.  After all, there's a reason they were dropping bombs on this symbol during World War II, the Nazi's were the bad guys, and still are.  But this practice bomb target was the most elaborate one of the 45 or so we found.  That's why I featured it in this post.