Classic BMX Spots: The Huntington Beach Pier

Serious dirt jumping in the parking lot, just north of the Huntington Beach Pier, Core Tour 2002.  The Sheep Hills Locals were in strong effect that day, with guys like Cory Nastazio, Stephen Murray, Chris Duncan, Marvin Loetterle, Sean Butler, and Midget Cory Walters hucking it over these three big sets of doubles.  But BMX riding at the Huntington Beach Pier area goes back almost to the beginning of BMX itself.

If you've read any of my other blogs, you know I come from the 1980's BMX freestyle world.  I got into BMX as a high school kid in Boise in 1982, and somehow would up as a mediocre freestyler and BMX/skateboard industry guy in the Huntington Beach area by 1987.  So this post is about my tribe, people who do tricks on "little kids' bikes." 

The Huntington Beach Pier itself dates back to 1915, and as I wrote in the surf post about the H.B. Pier, a "surf riding" demo by Hawaiian George Freeth was part of the opening day festivities.  So the H. B Pier's history with action sports goes back to the very beginnings of modern action sports.  But BMX itself started in 1970, in Long Beach and Malibu, so it was sometime in the early 1970's when BMX bikes first rode by the pier.  While it's not a BMX bike, here's some film of a bike rider cruising around Huntington Beach in 1970.  It was a much different town then, with two story brick buildings on Main Street, with no big hotels to be seen, and lots more oil pumps pumping away in the downtown area.  

BMX freestyle, the trick riding aspect of the sport, was invented by Bob Haro in about 1977-1978, and  began to spread in the early 1980's.  Sometime around 1983 or 1984, flatland freestylers began to hang out below the Huntington Beach pier, and do tricks for the crowds of beach goers.  Two of the very first BMX freestyle, flatland and ramp contests, were put on by the American Freestyle Association in the Surf Theater Parking lot.  That was a couple blocks form the H.B. Pier, right behind Wimpi's Burgers.  Those comps happened in the summers of 1984 and 1985, and were run by H.B. local freestyler/entrepreneur Bob Morales.  Here's NorCal rider Rick Allison doing flatland at that contest in 1984, and Eddie Fiola riding ramps.  I wrote another post about the BMX history in that parking lot, which you can check out here.  The first AFA contest was in Venice Beach in 1984, followed by the H.B. comp.  Those contests took the brand new, tiny sport aspect of BMX freestyle out of the skateparks, and turned it into a sport that could happen anywhere.  Huntington Beach was the home to both GT Bikes, Bob Morales, and the AFA, so it played a key role in the early growth of BMX freestyle.

I moved to H.B. in January of 1987, to work for Bob Morales, as editor and photographer of the AFA monthly newsletter.  Thanks to a zine I did in NorCal, I got a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, based in Torrance, in 1986, but didn't really click with the staff there, so I got laid off.  Bob picked me up to work at the AFA, and the magazines hired an East Coast BMXer/skater kid named Spike Jonze.  He did click with the crew there, and proved to be th eperfect fit for that crew.  And yes, it's that Spike Jonze.  Spike Jonze really was a BMXer.  Meanwhile, I headed down to the H.B. Pier on the weekends, and became one of the locals at the pier within a few weeks.  

This is me (Steve Emig) doing a Shingle Shuffle under the H.B. Pier in 1987.  Not sure what was going on with my hair, I let it grow out for about three months before spending money for a haircut.  I'm still a cheapskate like that.

The 1980's flatland scene at the pier had a few locals, most prominently Mike Sarrail, a 6' 4" guy who excelled at Miami hop hops, among other tricks.  Mike actually lived in Covina, way inland, but drove down to H.B. to ride every weekend, and was the most hardcore H.B. local BMX freestyler.  I was there most every weekend from 1987 to 1992 or so, unless there was a contest somewhere.  

At that time, there were a few freestyle skateboarders, Pierre Andre' from France, Don Brown from England, and Hans Lingren from Sweden, who skated there nearly ever day.  They all skated for one of the Vision Skateboards companies, which were based in Costa Mesa then.  We all hung out together, and rode and skated in the area under Maxwell's restaurant (where Duke's is now), where the outdoor seating is now, below, and just south of the pier itself.  Here's Pierre in 1989 in a short video that shows what that area looked like in the late 1980's on a weekday, when hardly any people were around.  

That was our riding and skating area. On the weekends, the skaters would skate for a while, and get a big crowd, usually 100 to 200 people, sometimes up to 500.  Then the police would roll by on their quads or a car, and break up the crowd because it was blocking the bike path.  Then, a few minutes later, us BMX freestylers would start riding, get a crowd of 100-200 or more people, and then the police would roll by in 20-30 minutes, and break up that crowd.  We did that all day long on both Saturday and Sunday, every weekend, from the late 1980's until the early 1990's.  I once figured out that I rode in front of at least 140,000 people, in person, at the Huntington Beach Pier, 100 or 200 people at a time.  The same goes for the other locals.  So while I didn't tour like the top pros and ams in freesytle, Mike, me, and the other H.B. locals rode in front of a lot of beach going people, spreading the stoke of BMX freestyle in our own way. 

Because the Huntington Beach Pier was a known spot for both skateboarding and BMX, and because it was right at the beach, anyone could show up on any given day.  The Lakewood area crew, which comprised Jeff and Tim Cotter, Ron Camero, Nathan Shimizu, Ron McCoy, and a couple others, came by a couple of weekends a month.  They were all good, solid riders, and most ended up in the 1988 Vision video, Freestylin' Fanatics.  Other SoCal local freesytlers, like Dan Hubbard, Scott Robinson, Chuck and Joe Johnson, and others came by frequently.  Top pro flatlanders, Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson, came by now and then as well.  One Saturday there might just be three of us there at noon, and by 3 pm, we'd have ten solid freestylers riding for the crowds.  Randy Lawrence moved to Huntington Beach from the desert in 1988, I think, and joined the locals at the pier.  Randy could learn any trick in five minutes, which drove Mike and I nuts.  He's the most natural rider I've ever met. 

The same was true for skaters, German freestyle skater Per Welinder showed up often, Bob Schmelzer was around a lot, street skaters Ed Templeton, Mark Gonzales, skate by often.  Jason Lee was part of the street skating crew in the 90's, also.  Natas Kapas came by once when I was there, Ray Barbee did as well, along with many others.  During that same era, Pierre Andre' got a French shoe company to start making skate shoes, called Etnies.  Pierre wound up taking it over, and bringing the operation to Costa Mesa, and it took off from there, becoming Sole Technology, parent company of Etnies, Emerica, E's, and Sheep shoes over the years, and Altamont clothing.  Don Brown worked there form the start.  So while there was a big "Skaters hate BMXers" vibe in a lot of places in the 1980's, at the H.B. Pier, were were all hanging out, loaning each otehr money for burritos, and influencing each other.  I learned half Cabs, nollies, and no comply's (footplant to 180 on flat) on my bike, influenced by the skaters.

While its seems really hard to believe now, but in the late 1980's, the lot on the Southeast corner of PCH and Main in Huntington, right across the street from the pier, was a paved vacant lot.  Bob Morales at the AFA had a few AFA local contests there, from 1987 to 1989, as I recall.  I don't know of any video footage or photos from those contests, but they were always fun comps, flatland and ramps, with lots of girls in bikinis hanging out to watch.  And every time, there would be a fender bender on PCH, somebody would be watching us ride, and run into the car in front of them.  

It may be hard to believe now, but this prime corner, at PCH and Main, was an empty lot from about 1987 to 1989.  Several local AFA contests and one BMX video jam, were held on this spot.  It's not anchored by Huntington Surf & Sport, the Duke Kahanamoku statue, and the Surfer's Walk of Fame.

One weekend in early 1988, Some guy started talking to Mike Sarrail while we were riding.  The guy said he wanted to put on some BMX contest to make a video.  Mike, being a helpful guy in general, told the guy all about freestyle, and told him that street riding was the new thing building.  Then the guy left.  When we would flatland in a public spot, random people would come up at times, and say they wanted to make a movie about us, or put on events, or do a TV show, or whatever.  99% of those people were full of shit.  But the guy Mike talked to actually did put on event, renting the Stonehenge jump ramp from GT, and getting a Beastie Boys clone band, called Metal MC to show up, and shoot a music video.  The guy had a video crew, and shot footage and made a video that sold in places like Kmart and Target.  It was a really fun event, all the top riders showed up, and we had a blast.  The guy actually made a video, and probably sold thousands of copies.  

San Diego shredder and Dirt Bro, Brand Blanchard turns one down at the video jam on the corner of PCH and Main in 1988.  Bill Batchelor photo.

 In the early 1990's, both skateboarding and BMX freestyle went underground, as the businesses collapsed in the early 90's recession.  Pierre and Don got busy with Etnies, and freestyle skating pretty much died.  Street skating took over, so those guys stopped hanging at the pier.  On our side, BMX flatland was into the rolling tricks, starting with whiplashes and Hang 5's in the 80's, and progressing from there.  Most riders got more into street riding, and there were a lot less riders, in general.  The flatland sessions at the H.B. Pier died off mostly, though  riders would show up and session, on occasion.  

In the 1990's, as a little BMX bike company S&M Bikes was housed in a single car garage on Alabama Street, BMX at the Huntington Beach Pier kind of faded, as we hit the jumps at Magnolia, near the Power Plant, or that new place on the edge of Costa Mesa, called Sheep Hills.  There was no money in BMX in the early 1990's, so the industry largely collapsed, as the hardcore riders learned ten different ways to make a meal out of a pack of ramen to survive.  But it was during this time that the riders took over the industry.  Along with S&M Bikes, Hoffman, FBM, Standard, Eastern, Kink, and a few other garage BMX companies got their start.  By the time ESPN woke up in 1995, got a whiff of Action Sports stoke, and started the X-Games, both the BMX and skate industries were being run largely by actual riders and skaters.  The TV coverage for action sports blew up, though the marketers tagged it with the dum bass "Extreme Sports" label, which took years to die off.  As snowboarder Steve Graham once said, "How can it be 'extreme,' this is what we do every day."  

During the 1990's, sparked a lot by Chris Moeller and the S&M Bikes crew, dirt jumping became it's own genre' of BMX riding, and a part of the X-Games.  A smaller contest series, the Core Tour put on comps nationwide, like the one in the video at the top of this blog post.  So dirt jumping, featuring several Sheep Hills Locals every time, pulled solid crowds at the Huntington Beach Pier area, once a year.  

As Action Sports grew in the late 1990's, with Huntington Beach being a worldwide hub for surfing, skateboarding, BMX, snowboarding, and early free ride and freestyle motocrossers, the U.S. Open of Surfing added the Soul Bowl comps to the annual surf extravaganza.  Every year, usually around the end of July or early August, the huge surf comp draws crowds of 100,000 people on the beach by the, and a small village of promotional booths springs up on the sand on the south side of the H.B. pier.  The Soul Bowl BMX draws some top BMX vert riders every year.

A bit of the action at the 2005 Soul Bowl BMX comp, at the U.S. Open of Surfing, on the sand, by the Huntington Beach Pier.  

 

I wound up back east for a decade, so I'm not sure when the Soul Bowl comps for BMX ended.  But through most of the 2000's it was part of the big surf contest festivities.

 

About 7 or 8 years ago, BMX freestyle at the Huntington Beach Pier came full circle, and flatland sessions at the pier became a weekly event again.  This time led by early freestyle pioneers and GT Bikes icons back in the day, 

Martin Aparijo with a backwards wheelie, H.B. Tuesdays jam, Huntington Beach Pier, 2019.  #steveemigphotos

 

Martin Aparijo and Eddie Fiola.  H.B. Tuesdays is a weekly flatland session and jam for Old School flatlanders, and any other flatland riders that want to hang out and ride.  For much of the time, these sessions took place just north of the H.B. Pier, in front of the amphitheater.  They've been moved a bit farther south, just south of the walk bridge over PCH from the Huntington Beach Hyatt hotel.  The parking lot there is mostly empty on Tuesday afternoons, and allows more room to ride.   These sessions continue now, every Tuesday afternoon into evening.  You can enter that section of the beach parking lot at Huntington Street, off PCH, and head south in the parking lot, until you see flatlanders.  Check out Eddie's bike model, the Former Pro, and session with some really cool riders.

From the flatland days of the early 1980's, until today, the Huntington Beach Pier has been a magnet for some great BMX freestyle.  I was stoked to be a part of the scene in the 80's and 90's.  But I'm an old, fat geezer, what about the New School, you ask?  Yeah, high caliber BMX freestyle still happens at the Huntington Beach Pier every year.  In 2019, the Van's Rebel Jam happened on the sand, replacing the Soul Bowl vert riding of years ago.  Now it's a great skatepark being built on the sand for a week, during the U.S. Open of Surfing, and top New School men and women throwing down what the got.  Check out this video from the summer of 2019.

 

Van's Rebel Jam park and street highlights from the summer of 2019.

As we all know, Mother Nature put us all in Time Out for over a year with the Covid pandemic in 2020, so no Rebel Jam happened.  There's not a lot on the web right now, but the Van's U.S. Open of Surfing is back on for 2021, happening August 2-8 at the H.B. Pier.  You can bet BMX will be part of the mix yet again.  For close to 40 years now, great BMX freestyle has been happening right around the Huntington Beach, California Pier, and it looks like it will keep going for a long time to come. 

The Lost Ship of Anza Borrego... a Southern California treasure story

This video tells the basic Nells Jacobsen story, about finding a long, low, ship on his property in the early 1900's.  According to the story, he found a box of jewels on the ship with rubies, emeralds, diamonds, topaz, and several types of gems.  But no one can find the ship now, or produce the artifacts that many people claim to have actually seen in the early 1900's.  

A guy walks into a bar with a Viking shield...

It sounds like the beginning of one of your dad's, or maybe grandpa's jokes.  But the story is real.  Like any good tale, there are different versions of it.  There are also several different "Lost Ship of the Mojave Desert" stories.  The best known story is of a guy who was out in the desert prospecting for gold, and was getting low on supplies, and running out of water.  Off in the distance, he saw what appeared to be a large sailing ship (think Christopher Columbus' ships or Spanish Galleon types) sitting out in the desert.  But it was a day or two away, and he was lost.  So he headed back to a town, told his story, and put together three expeditions to find that lost treasure ship.  But they never found the ship.  That's one series of the "Lost Ship of the Desert" stories.  Some later people think he just made up the story in order to finance trips to search for the ship, but he was searching for gold, instead.  He didn't find either.  So the whole idea sounds like a bunch of crap.

I first heard of this tale in a small book I stumbled across in the Huntington Beach library, in the 1990's, I think.  It was a small book of weird and odd news stories, from newspapers across Californiagoing back 80 years or more.  In that book, there was an article from a San Diego area newspaper, I think from the 1940's or 1950's.  The article said that a guy walked into a San Diego bar one night with a metal Viking shield.  When the bar patrons asked where he got it, he said, "There's a Viking ship out in the desert, sticking out of the side of a hill.  They guy said there were Viking shields, metal ones, like the one he had, along the sides of the ship.  I think that article talked about some jewels as well.  He bought drinks, everyone drank hard, and they had a good time that night.  The prospector wandered back off into the mountains.  

Another part of the story is that a woman named Myrtle Botts, out hiking around 1933, east of the Salton Sea.  She saw an old prospector, and he told her about a Viking ship, sticking out of the side of a hill,  and she hiked out to the area, and saw the ship, what appeared to be a Viking ship, sticking out of the side of a hill, according to the story I first read (in th elibrary book).  She went back a few weeks later with her husband, to the exact location.  But a landslide had brought that whole hillside down, covering the ship.  There had been an good sized earthquake in between, and they believed the earthquake had caused the landslide.  The ship was lost.  The site of that ship was said to be Canebrake Canyon, which is deep in the Anza Borrego State Park these days, about halfway between route 78 and route 8, south of Ocotillo Wells.  Canebrake Canyon shows up on Google maps, but it's about 24 miles from the bottom end of the Salton Sea, and it's in the middle of nowhere, even today.

This ship in the desert story could just be an old treasure tale that's been embellished over time... if it wasn't for Nels Jacobsen.  He was an actual farmer in the Imperial Valley area.  He had a farm in the early 1900's in the hills, east of the city of Imperial, southwest of the Salton Sea.  Most people aren't to familiar with the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea these days, but you've heard of Coachella, where the huge music festival takes place.  Everyone knows Coachella these days.  This story happened about 75 miles south-southeast of Coachella, near the city of Imperial.  

Nels Jacobson, a Norwegian farmer from Highland, California, bought land west of  Imperial, to raise hogs, alfalfa, and barley.  In 1906 (about) and he went into a pool hall near his home, and asked a 17-year-old drifter (hobo, traveling looking for work) named Elmer Carver, if he would work for him for a few days.  Elmer traveled with him to the farm, east of Imperial.  Nels, who spoke in a thick Norwegian accent, showed him how to care for the hogs, and do whatever else needed done.  Nels was going to L.A. to sell a bunch of jewels he found on a ship, which was mostly buried in a sand dune, about 200 feet behind his house.  A windstorm had partially uncovered the ship, and Nels dug it out, and found a chest full of gemstones.  When he picked up the chest, it disintegrated.  So Nels and his young wife sifted through the sand, and found many gemstones.  Nels also used some of the extra long planks from the ship for the hog pen.  Nels headed off to L.A. to sell most of the gemstones, and Elmer and Mrs. Jacobson stayed at the farm for a few days, with Elmer taking care of the hogs, and doing the other farm work needed. 

Elmer asked Mrs. Jacobson about the ship, and she told him of the jewels, and went to the bedroom, and came back with a tiny box with several different jewels.  They were the jewels left over, after Nels too many of the jewels to sell.  A huge ruby was one of those left, and there was also a crucifix with blue gemstones, believed to be topaz.  She told Elmer the ship was about 200 feet behind the house.  The next day, Elmer went out back, and sure enough, he saw the ship, still partially buried.  Elmer Carver retold this story in 1964, and claimed he still knew then exactly where the ship was.  You can read the full story here.

So between the Myrtle Botts story from 1933, and Elmer Carver's story of Nels Jacobson back in 1906, we have two, different, "Viking style" ships, out in desert of Southern California.  I looked both of these locations up on Google Maps, and while they are in the same region, west and southwest of the Salton Sea, they're at least 20 to 25 miles away from each other.  So we have two ships, that shouldn't be there, out in the freakin' desert.  

 

But the stories say they are, or at least were, out there.  That's the mystery.  Two mysteries, actually.  And at least one of them had real treasure on it.  Both ships were still partially buried when seen.  If either one actually exists, there could definitely be more treasure out there.  For the Nels Jacobson ship, it could be a Viking style ship.  Maybe.  But the crucifix in the treasure sounds like Spanish treasure from the west coast of Mexico, Central America, or South America, from the Spanish conquest days of the 1500's to maybe the early 1700's.  Vikings were pagans, to start with, and if somehow they did get to Southern California (technically possible but highly unlikely), they would have predated Christians in the Americas by several hundred years.  So it sounds like a ship that looked something like a Viking ship. 

For the Myrtle Botts ship, the prospector said it was a Viking ship, with round shields along the sides of it.  Stuck in a rock, way out in the desert.  If there was a ship out there, it's an even bigger mystery. 

 First of all, while we know now that the Vikings did land in North America, in eastern Canada.  There's arguable evidence, like the Kensington runestone, that they may have made it into the Great Lakes.  But there's no evidence so far that they made it to the west coast of the U.S..  To make it to the west coast, they would have had to either cross the Arctic ocean, and come around Alaska, or make an overland trip (Like Lewis and Clark), and then make some new ships when they hit the Pacific.  There's no evidence of that.  But then, there was no evidence that the Vikings made it to North America when I was a kid, and now evidence has been found, and well documented.  They were Vikings, after all.

Second, while the Salton Sea, the biggest lake in California, is near where the ships were reported, it was accidentally formed in 1905-07, when water from the Colorado River broke through a canal, and flooded the low lying desert, forming the current (and now highly polluted and receding) Salton Sea.  That area was dry before that.

The second big issue is that the reported ships was long and low, like  Viking ships, not a Spanish Galleons or other three masted type sailing ship we think of when thinking of treasure.  So if there's any truth to this story, we have one, maybe two Viking ships that should never have been within 3,000 miles of Southern California.  And we have that Myrtle Botts ship, up on a hill, above and miles away from a huge lake that was formed in 1905, and dry before that.  So this must all be bullshit, right?  

Maybe not.  This is why I love this story.  And I'm not the only one.  The late novelist Clive Cussler wove the lost ship of the desert tale into one of his novels, the book Inca Gold.  I read it may years ago, and it's a good read.  In his novel, he ties a weird South American tribe, the Chachapoyas, to the lost ship of the desert tale, and creates his own idea of how a ship may have wound up in the desert.  the Chachapoyas were actually described as looking kind of like Vikings.  Seriously.  Cussler wasn't just a novelist, he was a seasoned SCUBA diver and shipwreck hunter.  He and his team found the Civil War submarine the Hunley, and other shipwrecks in real life.  So while he told a lot of fictional tales based on real events or legends, he put a lot of thought, and some truth into his stories. 

Back to Nels Jacobsen's ship near the Salton Sea.  While the current Salton Sea formed in 1905-07.  To a geologist, that low lying area is known as Lake Cahuilla.  The current Salton Sea is 236 feet below sea level.  But that area, Lake Cahuilla, has filled and emptied many times over the last 40,000 or more years.  At times, the water level has been as much as 337 feet to 407 feet higher than it is now, which means Lake Cahuilla was much, much bigger than the current Salton Sea.  Those higher lake levels would put the shoreline high above Nels Jacobsen's property.  But before about 1580, there was water in Lake Cahuilla, and probably a higher level than the current Salton Sea.  But the really high water levels were thousands of years ago.  So it is possible, although unlikely, that Vikings, if they made it to the west coast, could have sailed on Lake Cahuilla 1,000 or so years ago.  But it should have been dry for much of the Conquistador era, from 1580 to the early 1700's. 

Now, about that long, low, "Viking" ship that Nells Jacobsen reported finding.  What if it wasn't an actual Viking ship, but a similar type of ship that looked (to a Norwegian) like a Viking ship.  If there was a ship, it's possible it belonged to some Native American tribe.  But I have another crazy idea.  What if it was a Polynesian voyaging ship.  They are also long and low, and made of long planks of wood, though usually in a catamaran, or maybe outrigger style.  And the Polynesians DID sail from the Australian/New Zealand area to islands all over the Pacific.  And there is increasing evidence that they may very well have reached both the South and North American west coasts.  In fact, the Chumash Indian tribe, who lived in the Malibu area, have a traditional connection to the Polynesians.  The Chumash canoes were made almost identical to Polynesian canoes.  Their tradition says they learned the technique from people who came form over the ocean.  The middle of this America Unearthed show (23:38) gets into that connection.  I'm not saying that either of these ships, if they actually exist(ed), are Polynesian, I'm just saying that is a remote possibility, and they could be mistaken for a Viking ship, when half buried, and could have navigated Lake Cahuilla like an actual Viking ship could have.  But that doesn't account for the metal shields on the Myrtle Botts ship. 

Or, perhaps, the ship that Nels Jacobsen claimed to have found, and that the prospector told Myrtle Botts about, belonged to an even earlier group of sea faring people, a group still unknown to us.  There's mounting evidence that there were very smart people many places in the world, before the Ice Age ended, about 12,000 years ago.  We have two stories of ships in places they should not be, one with actual treasure found, here in Southern California.  Both are mysteries no one has solved.

In any of these cases, the ship itself would probably be the great treasure, providing physical proof to a part of human history lost to us, whether 600 years ago, 1,000 years ago, or many thousands of years ago.  But there might still be jewels, maybe gold, and other treasure still on that ship as well.  Did I draw you in yet?  Because I definitely want to dig farther into this story myself.  There are two mysteries out there to solve...

The Most Popular Beaches in Southern California

This is NOT normal surf for Huntington Beach, not even close.  These sets in 2016 are about as big as waves ever get in Huntington Beach.  H.B. may be the real "Surf City" from the Jan and Dean song, but most days the waves are 2-5 feet.  But Huntington Beach still has one of the best overall stretches of urban beach, 8.3 miles worth, of anywhere in Southern California.

 It's late June, 2021, as I'm writing this.  California is emerging from 15 months of pandemic protocol restrictions, and people everywhere want to get outside, and go to the beach, and everywhere else.  With 4th of July weekend coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought it's a great time to look at some of the best beaches in California.

California is a huge state, taking up much of the West Coast of the continental United States, as we all know.  With 840 miles of coastline, it ranks third in total coastline, behind Alaska (over 6,000 miles of coast), and Florida).  With all that shoreline, you can bet their are dozens, maybe hundreds, of great beaches in California.  And Californians love to go to the beach.  But people go for all different reasons.  

For most people, though, the beach is either a day trip for the family, or for a group of young people, looking to meet other young people.  Bikinis, trunks, laying out, volleyball, surfing, boogie boarding, and often evening bonfires, are the most popular things we do at the beach.  But other people like to go to secluded, unpopulated beaches, to get away from the crowds.  There are plenty of beaches in California for all.  For this blog post, I concentrated on the beaches other people have written about online, trying to get a consensus of the most popular "beach day," type beaches.  Then I tried to narrow it down to beaches where there's plenty of sand, you can swim, boogie board, or surf, and that have bathrooms, probably food stands, and very important, a decent amount of parking.  

Let's face it, spending 45 minutes driving around a beach city, to find a parallel parking place, so you can go relax at the beach, kind of starts things off on a bad note.  So these are a few of the overall, most popular beaches for a traditional day at the beach.  

Southern California-

Orange County-

Huntington Beach- Huntington State Beach and Bolsa Chica State Beach- Huntington Beach is the only major beach city in Southern California that doesn't have houses built right up to the sand.  It's in Orange County, basically straight west of Disneyland.  With just over 8 miles of wide, sandy beach, good quality restrooms (for a beach), lifeguards, food stands, and tons of parking, the Huntington Beach State beach (south of the H.B. pier, along PCH), and Bolsa Chica State Beach (along PCH, about 2 miles north of H.B. pier) are the most popular "beach day" beaches for Orange County, the inland empire, and southern L.A. County.  Fire rings are there in some locations for evening bonfires.  I lived for most of 20 years in H.B., and spent lots of time at the beach.  It's a lot more crowded and popular these days, and there's a reason for that. 

Laguna Beach- Main Beach- Parking is an issue in Laguna, there are some small parking areas in the downtown area, but mostly street parking.  There are good public restrooms near two parking areas, and lots of restaurants near Main Beach, located at Broadway and PCH (Pacific Coast Highway).  Laguna Beach has miles of coastline, with big cliffs along most of it, leading to separated sections of beaches.  It's one of the most picturesque beach areas in SoCal, which is why so many artists moved there 80+ years ago, and since.  There are dozens of art galleries all around the Main Beach area.  I discovered the work of Vladimir Kush in Laguna in the late 90's, and have been a fan since.  He has a big gallery right by Main Beach, check it out.  

Salt Creek Beach- Dana Point- Salt Creek Beach is another popular beach, a few miles south of Laguna Beach, officially in Dana Point.  It's right below the Ritz Carleton hotel in Dana Point, and the beach parking is near the hotel entrance.  This is one of the more popular beaches in south Orange County.

 Crystal Cove State Park- Between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach- Crystal Cove State Park is a kind of secret beach that thousands of people drive by daily.  I have been there a couple of times, and it's a great beach if you want to avoid the huge crowds without leaving Orange County.  The beach is hidden from PCH, below some cliffs.  It's just a wide open, scenic area with  a great ocean view, as you drive by.  There's a couple miles of beach, and multiple parking areas.  There are restrooms, near the parking areas, but you have to walk a bit, and down the trails, to get to the beach itself.  There are people around, but it's much less crowded than Huntington Beach or Laguna Main Beach.  There actually are a lot of crystal stones there, by the way, most rounded by surf action.

 Los Angeles County-  

Santa Monica main beach- While Santa Monica is a great beach city, and there is some beach parking, the Santa Monica Pier is the main reason people go to the beach there, not the beach itself.  But it's on a couple of the "best beaches" lists online.  The pier is one everyone has seen in movies, it has a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, bumper cars, and lots to do.  There's also a lot of shops on the promenade just inland of the pier.  If you're looking for a day on the beach itself, and you plan to actually get in the water, you may want to head a bit north, and find one of the Malibu beaches to go to.

Malibu- Known for luxurious homes of movie stars, there are several great beach areas in Malibu to spend a day at the beach.  Much of it has cliffs right above the beach.  Will Rogers State Beach, north of Santa Monica, before Malibu, is one I saw mentioned online multiple times.  Less crowded than the other two places, the water's probably a bit cleaner than the Santa Monica area as well.

San Diego County-

Coronado Beach- San Diego- I've never been to this beach, but every "best beaches" list I looked at online listed Coronado Beach.  The luxurious Hotel Coronado is right there.  It's on the island where the Naval Air Station is, west of downtown San Diego, which you get to be going over the (you guessed it) Coronado Bridge. 

Ocean Beach- San Diego- Located at the west end of the 8 freeway, north of downtown San Diego, Ocean Beach is where a San Diego local said was his favorite beach, when I asked on Facebook.  There is beach parking, and also an area open for dogs.  

I originally started this post to list a bunch of beaches statewide, but there are just too many, and this blog is pretty much SoCal-centric for right now.  But for those of you farther north, here are some Central Coast and Northern California beaches that showed up multiple times in other articles and posts online.  Google them at your leisure, and see if any sound appealing to go explore.

Heading north from Malibu:  East Beach in Santa Barbara (a ways north of Malibu and L.A. on PCH). Pismo Beach, in Pismo Beach, just south of San Luis Obispo (Central Coast).  Carmel Beach in Big Sur (near Monterey, a ways south of S.F. Bay Area) Santa Cruz Main beach, in Santa Cruz (west of San Jose area).  Stinson State Beach in Stinson Beach, in Marin county, that's north over the Golden Gate Bridge, then follow CA route 1 (it's not called PCH up there, I guess).  

For uncrowded NorCal beaches with no amenities, I've personally been to Muir Beach, which is a bit south of Stinson Beach, in Marin county, and much farther north, Big River Beach in Mendocino.  I had a good day at both, and both take a little walk to get down to the beach.  There will be some people, but probably not very many.  I waded into a good sized sea cave at Big River Beach, which was cool.  

If you really want to avoid all crowds, my old San Francisco based BMX friend, Maurice Meyer, suggested The Lost Coast.  That's a huge area of undeveloped beaches in Mendocino ad Humboldt counties, basically a ways north of Fort Bragg, and south of Eureka, in redwood territory.  I think that's where Sasquatch families go on beach day.  If you head up there, remember, the water's pretty cold, and if there are lots of seals or sea lions on the beach, there are probably plenty of sharks in the water.  Probably not the best place for a long solo swim.  

OK, now I want to drive up the coast and check out all the little known beaches.  But that's the idea of this blog, to give you (and me) some ideas for cool day trips, or maybe a longer excursion.  Have a good summer people, and if you see my fat ass at the beach, don't drag me back into the water, like those Greenpeace people did.  I'm going to lose weight, I swear. 

Some new bike memes... the stoke is real

I'm an old, HAS BEEN, BMX freestyler, and a former BMX and skateboard industry guy.  A lot of my exploring new areas happened on my freestyle bike back in the day.  So bike riding is in my blood, and even when I'm fat and don't have a bike, I still write about it.  Or make bike memes.  Here are some of the new bike memes I just made, with some vintage photos I found going through hundreds of public domain photos.  Enjoy.  Share as needed.  #steveemigmemes

Generation X BMXers be like...

 

The Ashtray- The tiny, pathetic skatepark that made every other new skatepark in California possible

In her early days, while leading the way for women in street skating in the late 1990's and early 2000's, Elissa Steamer was a local at The Ashtray, and nearby Oceanview High School.  It's not in this clip, but there are a couple of shots from Oceanview, which is a block away. 

First, a little skate history.  There's no consensus on who invented the first skateboard, one prominent theory says it was a bored surfer in San Diego in about 1958.  A 2 X 6, and some roller skate wheels, and he could go "sidewalk surfing" when the waves were flat. The "Devil's Toy" was born.  The start of skateboarding was probably something like that.  The first big wave of skate popularity was in 1965-1966, and skateboarding looked like this.  The quick fad of corporate interest faded, and skateboarding went underground. 

In the early 1970's, skating moved to downhill speed runs, wheelies, slaloms, and carving banks, led by guys like Bruce Logan, among many others.  That led to the second big wave of popularity, around 1975-1980.  Again, skateboarding became a fad to large toy companies, a way to make a quick buck for a couple of years.  I was one of those 70's kids who started skating during that fad, in the tiny town of Willard, Ohio, in 1976, in my case.

Officially called the Murdy Park skatepark, this is the first public skatepark in California, and it quickly got dubbed "The Ashtray," because it was so small, and kind of looked like an ashtray from the 1970's.  The bank was kinked, with a cracks right in front of it, but it still got skated... a lot.  This little skatepark made every other public skatepark in California possible.  #steveemigphotos

 

  But out in Southern California, where the sport was centered, a group called the Z-Boys, the Zephyr Surf Shop skate team out of Venice Beach, along with Duante Peters and a few others down in Orange County, discovered empty swimming pools were a great place to skate.  This led to the first wave of skateboard parks in the late 1970's, and a new aspect of skating, vertical walled pools, concrete waves that never moved, that could be "surfed" on skateboards, like Tony here in Marina Del Rey in 1978.  Suddenly skateparks became a viable business in Southern California, and select places across the United States, and a few foreign countries. The boom surged for a while, but then began to fade in the early 1980's.  One by one, the skateparks of the second wave of skateboarding closed down.  

By the mid-1980's, only two were left in Southern California, Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, and Del Mar Skate Ranch in Del Mar (north of San Diego).  In addition to skateparks pushing the evolution of skateboard vert riding, BMX bike riders in the mid-1970's realized skateparks were fun on bikes, as well.  Bob Haro is credited with inventing BMX freestyle, about 1977, and by 1985, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, and a few others, took BMX vert riding to a new level in the skateparks.  

Vert skating and bike riding both moved largely to halfpipes for contests and demos, because it's really hard to take a concrete skatepark on the road to do demos.  First Del Mar closed, and then in late 1988, Pipeline Skatepark, the last California Skatepark closed, and a few months later, in 1989, was eaten by the excavator.  

 

This curved ledge/wall has seen some serious use in the last 26-27 years.  There are much better skateparks around, but sessions still happen at The Ashtray.  It's just north of Warner, on Goldenwest, in Huntington Beach.  #steveemigphotos

 

During that same period, in the third wave of skateboarding, in the late 1980's, Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guererro, and Natas Kaupas took skateboarding back to the streets in a new way, taking Rodney Mullen's flat ground ollie, kickflip, and other freestyle tricks, to new terrain.  Street skating began growing as vert skating faded.  Pool skating and BMX went underground, and was banished in California to empty backyard pools and the Nude Bowl, way out in the desert.  

As luck would have it, I was working at Unreel Productions, the video company for Vision Skateboards, one of the "Big 5" skateboard companies of the late 1980's.  A handful of then Old School skaters there had a plan.  They wanted public skateparks to become a thing.  the time had come for free, open all the time, public skateparks.  They tried to talk the city of Costa Mesa, where Vision was located, into building one.  But Costa Mesa, like all cities, was worried about liability.  They didn't want to get sued for millions of dollars, because some skater fell and broke his arm.  

So before public skateparks could happen, those Old School skaters had to get a state law passed so that cities couldn't be sued for liability at skateparks.  That process took several years.  Then they had to talk a city into building a skatepark.  then they had to talk the city into funding that skatepark, and actually get it built, and see if a public skatepark could work ( in the eyes of city leaders, we all knew it would work).  

I think it was about 1993 by the time the first public skatepark in California was built.  That was in Murdy Park, officially at 7000 Norma drive in Huntington Beach, near Goldenwest and Warner.  Without this sketchy little park paving the way (literally), none of the other public skateparks in all of California would have happened.  So if you ever make it to Huntington Beach, go to The Ashtray, snap and ollie, and say thanks.  We thought it was going to get turned into a duck pond by now.  It's not great, but it's cool it still exists.

The most skatable part of The Ashtray, this bench been ground by a lot of legends of skating, from Ed Templeton and Elissa Steamer, to dozens of others.  It's waiting for you.  #steveemigphotos

 

What exactly did this little skatepark, The Ashtray, open the way for?  All of this, and a lot more:

 

Andy Anderson at Venice Beach skatepark 

 

Tucker Smith (blue helmet) and friends at Laguna Niguel skatepark 

 

Omar Hassan on all kinds of concrete (including public parks) 

 

Etnies/Lake Forest skatepark

 

Lyn Z Adams Hawkins (pre-Pastrana era)

 

 Christian Hosoi and Duane Peters at Lake Cunningham skatepark (San Jose)

 

Jesse Gregory at Costa Mesa (?) skatepark 

 

San Clememte skatepark locals 

 

The biggest public skatepark in California 

 

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Lloyd Wright's tombstone... for an idea

Tucked inconspicuously behind a gas station in Huntington Beach, at the corner of Springdale and Warner, this is a tombstone, to an idea, for a 94 foot high advertising tower that architect Lloyd Wright wanted to build in 1970.

There are all kinds of weird urban legends, and thousands of weird artifacts and abandoned buildings and bits of American history, long forgotten in California, and across the U.S.A..  This is the only one I think I can claim credit for bringing back into public awareness.  Thirty four years after I first found saw this tombstone, I'm still learning more about its story.  Here's my part of this weird story.

 In 1986, a zine I published about BMX freestyle in the San Francisco Bay area, landed me a job in Torrance, at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  They liked my work, but I was pretty uptight, and kind of bossy, and just wasn't the right fit for the small, family business.  So I got laid off at the end of 1986, and they hired some 17-year-old BMX/skater kid named Spike Jonze to fill the spot.  He was the right fit.  And yeah... he's that Spike Jonze.

Meanwhile, I landed a job editing the newsletter for the American Freestyle Association, down in Huntington Beach.  My boss, Bob Morales, was a 23-year-old BMX freestyler turned entrepreneur who started the AFA, put on the only BMX freestyle contests at the time, and also designed bikes, designed magazines ads for other companies, and did about 17 other things.  He was a born entrepreneur.   

I crashed on Bob's couch for a couple of weeks, then found an apartment on Springdale in Huntington Beach.  I moved into my new room, and found it was a short, mile and a half ,bike ride to work each morning.  I didn't have a car at the time.  I usually ended up working a bit extra every day, it was a small place, there were only three of us at first, Bob, his sister Riki, and me.  A really cool lade named Carmella started there shortly after.  But it was a small business, and there was always more stuff to do.  Usually around 6 pm or so, I'd ride home on my Raleigh freestyle bike (my only "factory" sponsor), grab some supper, and go practice my flatland tricks in a local parking lot.  At the time, BMX freestyle was flatland, or ground tricks, and quarterpipe and wedge ramp riding.  BMX street, park, and dirt jumping all turned into seperate sports later on.  

I started practicing every night for a couple hours, in one of the shopping center parking lots at Springdale and Warner.  Three of the four were kind of busy.  But the shopping center behind the Arco gas station was kind of run down, and pretty quiet in the evenings.  So that became my main practice area night after night.  

I would usually practice for 1 1/2 or 2 hours, and then go get a Coke at Steve's Char Burger, across the street, or maybe at Arco.  Sometimes I would go back to the parking lot, sit and drink my Coke for a while, then ride some more.  That was usually when there was some trick I was trying that I could almost, but not quite, pull off.  So I'd keep trying until I either landed it, or was exhausted.  

One of those nights, I got my Coke, and sat on the curb on the side of the gas station, taking a break.  I'd been riding there for two or three months at that point.  But something caught my eye.  Someone at the gas station had just trimmed the overgrown bushes at the back of the building.  There was a rounded stone sticking up, something that I'd never seen before because the bushes were so overgrown.  It looked like a tombstone.  

OK, you saw the photo at the top of this post, obviously, that big black tombstone was what I saw.  I pulled the bushes back so I could read the whole engraving.  At first I thought maybe it was some landmark, or the grave site of some famous person in local history, buried there back in the 1800's or something.  But the tombstone was built to commemorate a 94 foot high tower that "Lloyd Wright" wanted to construct at the shopping center, but the people of Huntington Beach shot the idea down, and "democracy" over-ruled the will of the architect.  The stone is dated 1970, and was put there by the developer, not Lloyd Wright himself. 

My first thought was "Man, that architect was one bitter motherfucker."  That's when I sat there, and looked around at the shopping center.  It was a bit different.  I'd noticed that before, but never thought much about it.  The corners of the buildings had these big, tilted diamond shapes on them.  There were also decorative pieces along the top of the front of the building, they repeated across the span.  It wasn't just your typical shopping center design.  I knew nothing about architecture, but I'm the son of a draftsman/engineer.  I realized that the architect definitely took some time to make this shopping center look different than every other one.  But a 94 foot high tower?  That's almost ten stories high?  He must have had some really cool idea, or at least thought he did, to get that upset about it getting shot down.  I went back to riding, and didn't think much more about it.  That was in the spring of 1987.

The diamond shaped slanted corners of the shopping center, and the decorative diamonds across the front facade. Lloyd Wright called these "kite" shapes, and used them often in his designs.  Westfair Shopping center.  Springdale and Warner, Huntington Beach.  #steveemigphotos

 

Fast forward nearly 20 years.  In the early summer of either 2006 or 2007, I was working as a taxi driver in Huntington Beach.  I worked 70-100 hours a week from 2003-late 2007, and those years all blend together.  I think it was probably May of 2007.  There were 200 or 300 college age kids from Ireland that came to Huntington Beach to work and party all summer.  I started picking up groups of them to take them to the bars on the weekends.  They were cool, and they kept asking me local questions.  Where's a department store to buy some cooking utensils?  Where's the nearest drug store?  What's the best part of the beach to have a bonfire?  None of them had cars, so I kept driving different groups of them around.  Each group rented a house or apartment, and had 8 to 12 people crammed in, men and women, to keep costs down.  As an old zine publisher (A zine got me the magazine job years before), I decided to make them a "Guide to Huntington Beach" zine, with all the basic info they needed to have a fun summer.

When I make zines, I go all out, and I wound up going to the library and doing some research on the history of Huntington Beach, not just online, but actually reading little books written decades before on H.B..  The more I learned, and the more weird little things I could think of to put in the guide, the bigger it got.  A week or two later, I had a 48 page zine I called "The Very, Very Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach."  It had all kinds of little known and obscure facts in it, including a paragraph about the Lloyd Wright tombstone to the tower idea, behind the Arco station at Springdale and Warner.  I had fun, and learned a lot about Huntington Beach, making that zine.  I made a bunch of copies, and handed them out to all the Irish kids.  They loved it.  I gave them out free, as promotion for my taxi.  Pretty much all the Irish kids in H.B. that summer called me whenever they needed a taxi ride.  Their taxi rides alone more than paid for the zine, several times over.

I made more copies, and handed them out to a bunch of other taxi passengers.  After a couple of weeks, people in downtown H.B. started walking up to my cab when I was parked, and they would ask, "Are you the cab driver that made that book about H.B.?"  I'd say, "Yeah," and hand them a zine.  That turned out to be the most popular zine I ever made, and I gave out about 250 copies of it.  They cost me about $2 each to make, but it was fun, and well worth it for me. 

What I didn't know is that the weird tombstone came to the attention of other people who liked the weird little urban story of the tombstone to the tower that didn't happen.  Until two days ago, when I took the photo above, I thought Frank Lloyd Wright, the world famous architect, was the guy who designed that shopping center, and got so mad about the tower, that the developer put up the tombstone.  But there was more to the story I never tracked down.  What I didn't know was that OC Weekly newspaper did this article on the Lloyd Wright tombstone in 2012... that I first saw in 1987, and wrote about in my zine in 2007. Yes, the gas station owners knew it was there.  But I think I was the first person to write about the tombstone since 1970.  So my zine brought it back into the attention of some locals, and later OC Weekly wrote their article, and did the research to figure out it was Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. who designed the Westfair Shopping center.  The son of the world reknowned architect, successful in his own right, wanted to build the 94 foot tower at the shopping center.  And then, looking up to see if I could find any more info on it a couple days ago, I found this video..

Local H.B. writer Chris Epting took up this idea for some YouTube videos in 2020, and dug further into the story.  The legendary architect, Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr., designed this shopping center in 1969.  He designed that gas station as well, originally a Richfield station, now an Arco.  

He went by the name "Lloyd Wright," during much of his life.  He was a successful landscape designer and architect in his own right.  He designed much of the huge sets for the Douglas Fairbanks Robinhood movie.  He worked on some of the L.A. area houses his father designed.  He designed two of the early canopies for the Hollywood Bowl, and many other projects.  As it turns out, this shopping center, the Westfair Shopping Center in Huntington Beach, was his last job, when he was nearly 80 years old.  So at the end of his long career, the local citizens of Huntington Beach shot down his idea to add a 94 foot tower to the project.  Chris goes into more detail in the video above.  He even has a copy of the only sketch of the tower, and it's far different than the "oil derrick" that people thought it was supposed to look like.  

It's weird how obscure little things, like the story of this tombstone, that I first saw 34 years ago while riding my bike, and then wrote about myself 14 years ago, keeps evolving.  While my 2006 or 2007 zine seems to be what got a few people checking this oddity out, I never dug up the whole story.  So now, 13-14 years after the zine, another researcher helps me, and now you readers, learn why there's a big tombstone behind a gas station in Huntington Beach.  

The Arco gas station is at 5981 Warner (at Springdale) in Huntington Beach.  The tombstone is behind the station, right by the pole for the big Beef Palace sign.  The bushes are really cut back these days, so it's easy to read the tombstone, and take photos.  You can learn more about Lloyd Wright (aka Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr.) on his Wikipedia page.  

There are several videos about Frank Lloyd Wright (senior), and he had one crazy life.  At one point, a disgruntled chef locked all the windows and doors at his house, while Frank was away working, then set it on fire, and took an axe and killed 7 people, mostly members of Wright's family.  Seriously, it's a crazy story, the most tragic part of a really unusual and interesting life.  Wright came back form that horrible tragedy, and eventually rebuilt that house, and his career.  Here's the documentary I watched about his life.  

One last note about Frank Lloyd Wright.  In the last post, about Haunted Hollywood, the first video, the one by Jessica Chobot, has two Fank Lloyd Wright houses in the Hollywood area that are said to be haunted.  That's just a weird coincidence. 

Haunted Hollywood... several videos to show you where the ghosts are

Here's paranormal researcher Jessica Chobot with a quick video on a few of the most haunted places in and around Hollywood.  This video is 6 1/2 minutes, and will get you started if you're looking for ghosts and haunted spots, the places that put the weird in Hollyweird. 

 Back to the Online Guide to Hollywood Post

Hollywood is not only the original movie capital of the world, but has hosted a huge part of the music and TV industries for decades.  So there have been highly creative people clustered there for over 100 years now.  Creative people are often open to all kinds of new ideas, and plenty, from magician Harry Houdini on down, have had an interest in all things metaphysical.  In addition, obviously many actors, musicians, and others were famous around the world.  When you add these things together, you get a ton of ghost and haunting stories, including ghosts of famous people.  So for all of you interested in the paranormal, Hollywood is a major hot spot.

 The videos linked below get longer as you go down the list.  Check out whichever ones grab your attention.  If you find a ghost, ask them to link to this blog post on their social media, and you can do that as well, if you like.  Happy ghost hunting!

Death by Fame (5 minutes)  (If you're reading this blog post, you're kind of weird, so check out her "Ask a Mortician" You Tube Channel you'll probably dig it)

Hollywood Forever Cemetery- The haunting history (9 1/2 minutes)

How Each Member of The Addams Family cast died (because you want to know, 10 minutes)

Haunted Theaters of Hollywood (11 minutes)

Top Ten Haunted locations in Hollywood (13 minutes)

Haunted Homes of Hollywood (14 1/2 minutes) 

Haunted Hotels of Hollywood/Celebrity ghost documentary (15 minutes)

Ghost Stories: Hollywood Ghosts (46 minutes)

Hollywood Ghosts & Grave Sites (61 minutes)

When you visit the Hollywood Boulevard and Highland, the main tourist area in Hollywood itself, this building, the old First National Bank building, it conspicuously empty.  This is some seriously high priced real estate.  When I started selling my artwork on Hollywood Boulevard in 2019, I couldn't figure out why.  Then one evening I saw someone giving a ghost tour, and was able to stand close enough to learn this building, like the Hotel Roosevelt nearby, and so many other buildings, is said to be haunted.  #steveemigphotos

Back to the Online Hollywood Guide Post

The huge desert sculptures of Borrego Springs

This is a great video showing a few of the 130 metal sculptures around Borrego Springs.  

The metal sculptures in the desert in the Borrego Springs area are one of the weird places I've heard about fairly recently.  I haven't had a chance to get out there yet in person, but this video is a good look at several of them.  Bethany and Drew from this channel do a good job showing a bunch of the 130 sculptures in that area, including the 350 foot long dragon.  The work involved, and the detail just seems incredible.  There are sculptures of dinosaurs, extinct animals that lived in California, current animals, and some prospectors and other people.

Borrego Springs is in the Anza Borrego state park area, near Ocotillo Wells, for you motocross riders.  It's a bit north of route 78, east of Carlsbad and Escondido, and west of the Salton Sea and the 111 freeway.  Here's one of the online maps of where the different sculptures are.  

To cap this off, here's one of the last shows from California PBS legend Huell Howser, who made a career showing us all interesting places and stories around this state.  In the segment below, Huell interviews both land owner Dennis Avery and the self-taught artist who makes the sculptures, Ricardo Breceda.  This clip was shot in 2012, when there were 54 sculptures.  Huell Howser died about a year later, at age 67. 

Who the heck is Steve Emig?

Me doing a wall ride over my sister's head, Blues Brothers Wall, Huntington Beach, CA, 1990.  

For anyone stumbling across this blog who's wondering who I am, this blog post I wrote in 2017 tells most of the creative work I've done in my life. 
 

Famous people who were once homeless

Guy Laliberte' wanted to travel the world.  He landed in London with $50 in his pocket, and slept on a park bench that first night. He not only became an accomplished street performer, he co-founded Cirque du Soleil, and traveled into space and stayed on the International Space Station, as a 50th birthday present to himself, among many other things.  The point?  Just because you see somebody sleeping outside doesn't mean they will never accomplish anything.  I worked on the Saltimbanco, the first Cirque du Soleil show to come to Orange County, CA, in 1993.  Cirque was one show, one troop of smart, hardworking people with a Big Top then.  I met Guy on the site two shows later, in 1997.  Cirque du Soleil is the single best run business I've ever seen or worked for.  Really.

Steve Harvey.  Tyler Perry.  Daniel Craig.  Sean Parker (Napster).  Tupac Shakur.  Robert and Kim Kiyosaki.  Lil' Kim.  Jennifer Lopez.  Ed Sheeran.  David Letterman.  Jewel.  Djimon Honsou.  Jay Leno.  Shania Twain.  Col. Harlan Sanders (who founded KFC). Jim Carey.  Jesus of Nazareth (he appeared to be on a "couch tour" through his three ministry years in the Gospel).  The Buddha (Siddartha Gautama).  Halle Berry.  Michael Oher.  Jean-Michele Basquiat.  Sylvester Stallone.  James Cameron.  Patti Smith.  Kelly Clarkson.  Hilary Swank.  Matisyahu.  Carmen Electra.  Ben Franklin.  KRS-One.  Jim Cramer.  Kurt Cobain.  William Shatner.  Charlie Chaplin.  Dr. Phil.  Suze Orman. John Paul Dejoria. Ella Fitzgerald.  Harry Houdini.  

I could (and already have) write thousands of words on homelessness.  I first became homeless for about three weeks in 1987, because a roommate moved out and left me with more rent than I could pay.  I slept on top of a quarterpipe in the American Freestyle Association trailer, until I found a sketchy, but cheap, room I could rent.  At the time, homeless people were largely considered down and out, and the general attitude was that most of them would get back on their feet at some point.  In the 34 years since, there has actually been a concerted effort by some groups to dehumanize homeless people.  

Now there's a widespread notion that most homeless people simply fucked up at life itself, and are worthless, an will never, ever, amount to anything.  The reality is that the vast majority of the estimated 3 million homeless people a year have no place to stay for a week to maybe 2-3 months.  Most of them get back on track, relatively quickly.  But you don't see those people.  

What we see in many major cities is homeless people everywhere now, visible homeless people.  You are told (by P. R. campaigns) that these people are homeless for three reasons: 1) Drug addiction issues.  2) Mental illness.  3) Alcoholism.  The reality is, and you already know this, MOST drug addicts have a place to live.  Most mentally ill people have a place to live.  Most alcoholics have a place to live.  You can think of people in each of those categories, that you know yourself, that live in a nice house or apartment.  

So why are some people in those categories homeless (like me, the guy writing this blog post)?  The main reason is lack of a strong family or social network, that will help us get through a tough situation.  Those addiction and mental health issues are part of the picture for a large number of homeless people.  But it's the social network, and the high bar to get going again once you hit a certain level of homelessness, that keeps people on the streets long term.  

In addition, our society has gone through major changes in the number of high paying jobs available over the last 40+ years.  We've all gone through major technological changes, which has completely changed the work world in the last 40 years.  These major societal shifts are displacing a huge number of people, many of which become homeless or impoverished at some point. I've written a lot on these major societal shifts, which you can read here.  

One last thought (for now).  The Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness was led by the United Way, and it started in 2002.  Nineteen years later we have far more visible homeless people than ever before.  Think about that one.  

My point here is simply restating the old adage, "Don't judge a book by its cover."  You don't really know what that homeless person you see on the street will become in the next few years.  Most of them will not be superstars.  But a huge percentage of them will get out of homelessness, one way or the other. 

Famous People Who Were Once Homeless

Noted Individuals Who Were Once Homeless  (212 names) 

Blogger's note- 9/27/2021:  I was homeless when I started this blog, just for the record.  Adding this note in late September 2021, still homeless, still blogging.  

Gram Parson's cremation site at Joshua Tree National Park

Mortician Caitlyn Doughty, in the video above, calls Gram Parsons "the most iconic corpse," like, in America... ever.  That's how weird this story is.  The story of life just after his death is one of the craziest stories in music history.  Or any history.  Wild horses couldn't pull me away from this blog post.  The spot for today's blog post is the rock overhang you can see her showing at 13:50 in this video.  It's on the side of Cap Rock, in Joshua Tree National Park, northeast of Palm Springs, California.  I found this same spot in 2000, not knowing anything about this story.  This video above does a great job of telling the story of the post death high jinks surrounding Gram's body, I highly recommend watching the whole 20 minute video when you get a chance.  I'm now not only a fan of Gram Parsons, but of Caitlyn and her Ask a Mortician channel, as well. 

The story of this particular spot, an overhanging area on the side of a big rock outcrop, starts in the 1990's for me.  In 1992, I got a job on the stage crew of the hit TV show American Gladiators.  I'm in black, squatting, behind Larry the Ref, at :25 in that clip, and on the far left at 1:34 as he comes down off the wall.  I worked right down on the floor for the six or seven summer weeks we taped all the shows for that season, with the Gladiators and contenders themselves.  I was a spotter, and we practiced the games against them over the first few days, then hooked them into climbing harnesses, boosted them up on the pugil stick towers, and stuff like that, along with helping the grips and riggers change the huge sets for the show. 

One of the new Gladiators that year was a rhythmic gymnast, dancer, and hardcore rock climber named Salina Bartunek.  Of all the Gladiators, Salina, who played Elektra, and Shelly Beattie, who played Siren, were the two I got to know best.  Between action on the show, I flipped through the rock climbing magazines Salina had on set, and listened to her stories of climbing several places around the U.S.. 

Since I had always been afraid of heights, I started climbing on the bottom of the show's climbing wall after work at night.  While I never became a great rock climber, going up huge walls at Yosemite or anything, I became a pretty decent at bouldering, which is climbing small, technical, rock walls without ropes, usually only 10-15 feet high.  My favorite spots were Stony Point in Chatsworth, and The Beach in Corona Del Mar, where I climbed 35-40 foot walls without ropes sometimes.  I was a hardcore BMX freestyler at the time, and bouldering  gave me a completely different type of stoke, something I did alone mostly, at a handful of spots around Southern California, through the 90's.  There's a simple purity to bouldering, it's just you, a pair of climbing shoes, a chalk bag, and a big hunk of rock, or maybe an urban wall.  Nothing else.  I loved that.  

As I got into more and more into climbing, there was one place I really wanted to make a trip out to, Joshua Tree National Park.  While only about an hour and a half drive from L.A. and Orange County, I didn't have a car through much of the 90's, I was living really low budget, working a variety of odd jobs, mostly being a furniture mover.  I never made it out to Joshua Tree in the 90's.  In 1999, after an injury that made me quit my good paying, Hollywood lighting guy job, I became a taxi driver.  I started gaining weight, sitting in a car, 7 days a week.  But I did have a car, my cab.  So one Monday in the spring of 2000, I decided to take the day off from taxi driving, and just drive out to Joshua Tree.  

I rolled out there in my taxi, drove into one of the entrances of the huge park, and pulled up next to one of the huge, weird looking rock formations the park is known for.  No one else was there.  I grabbed my water bottle, and just wandered around the huge outcrop.  I climbed a little ways up on the rocks, just scrambling around, not really climbing.  But mostly I just wandered aimlessly, like I've loved doing in wild areas since I was a little kid.  I remember seeing a large lizard, about a foot long, a chuckwalla, much bigger than than little fence lizards I'd see in Orange County.

As I completed the loop around that big outcrop, I found an overhanging nook that had a bunch of graffiti on it, and some dried up flowers, a few beer cans, and I think a roach of a joint, or two.  It looked like some local party spot at first.  Someone had built a little campfire there a time or two.  But as I read the graffiti, it was all tributes to a guy who had obviously died, a guy named Gram.  I didn't know it at the time, but I randomly stumbled upon the place where country rock star Gram Parsons had been "cremated" by his friends, way back in 1973. The spot I stumbled on that day in 2000 is the exact spot Caitlyn shows in the video above, except there was a bunch of spray painted, marker written, graffiti, and the beer cans and joints.  

I left Cap Rock, and drove around, and wandered on foot, around several of the outcrops that day in 2000, but the tribute to the guy named Gram stuck in my mind.  I didn't have a computer, but I later went to the library, looked it up on that new thing called Google, and learned the basic story of the death, corpse theft, and "cremation" of country rock star Gram Parsons.  Then I listened to some of his music, which is good stuff.  I read that he actually wrote the song "Wild Horses," then gave it to friend Keith Richards, of The Rolling Stones.  These days the word is they may have co-wrote it, but Keith and Mick Jagger get credit for it officially.  Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers recorded the song, but the Rolling Stones made it a hit.  Gram's duet of "Love Hurts," with Emmylou Harris, is another great recording of his.

So today's spot in Crazy California 43 blog is that nook, almost a mini-cave, on the side of Cap Rock in Joshua Tree National Park, where Gram Parsons' friend brought his stolen corpse, and lit it on fire, trying to give him a proper (if highly drunken) cremation.  It's the site of one of the craziest death stories in rock 'n roll, country, and music history.  Gram became part of what is now known as The 27 Club, talented young people who died tragically at age 27, like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and later Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and several others.  Here's one of the only live performance videos of The Flying Burrito Brothers, singing "Christine's Tune," and it shows a little footage of them out at Joshua Tree in the beginning.

In 2003, the crazy story of Gram Parsons' corpse theft and drunken cremation was made into a movie called Grand Theft Parsons, starring Johnny Knoxville* and Christina Applegate.  I recommend watching the video above, Caitlyn the mortician does a great job of telling the story, which also includes the room he died in at the small motel in the desert.  You can still rent that room today.  This spot at Cap Rock in Joshua Tree, that I stumbled upon 21 years ago, is another of the locations with a weird story, which is part of Crazy California history now.  

Personally I've always wanted a Viking funeral, the whole burning boat thing, it just sounds cool, even though I'm from German and Dutch stock, not Vikings.  But that's not legal.  Guess I'll have to think up some other way to to have my friends put the "fun" back in funeral, after I kick off. 

 

 

* Johnny Knoxville is hilarious.  But he's also and idiot.  Don't try anything of the stupid shit you've seen him do.  Seriously, I know some of you are complete fucking morons, don't try this shit.  Really.  I mean it.