There's buffalos on that thar Island: The wild bison of Catalina Island

Visible from the Long Beach and Orange County coast, depending on the weather, Santa Catalina Island is home to one town, Avalon, and a few dozen "buffalo", or American bison.  Catalina has been exporting live bison to the Dakotas for 19 years, who knew?  

In the 24 years I've lived in Southern California, I've made it out to Catalina Island one time.  In 1997, I got hired to work on the stage crew of a John Tesh piano concert.  While it was a cool trip, I worked 6 10 hour shifts in 4 days, so I didn't get much of a chance to wander the island.  I did make it up to the Wrigley Mansion, now a hotel, on the top of a small mountain.  John Tesh begins the PBS special show playing piano on the hotel's balcony.  The view from up there is absolutely incredible.  

As a SoCal main lander, I'd heard there were buffalo on Catalina for some reason, and that was confirmed by a man we worked with over there at the show.  He was a descendant of the native tribe on the island, the Tongva, called Gabrielinos by the Spanish missionaries.  He told us a bit about the island on breaks and at lunch.  The Tongva go back at least 8,000 or more years, living on Catalina Island.

Until watching the clip above, I didn't realize the bison were brought over way back in 1924, for a movie, and have been living there since.  I'd heard the movie they were used in was in the 1940's or 1950's, but that's not the case.  So for close to 100 years now, American bison, which most of us call buffalo, have been living wild, but supervised, on Catalina.  They are native to much of North America, but not to California, or Catalina or the other Channel Islands. With a trip to Catalina, you can take a buffalo tour to go see them.  Safety tip:  Don't take selfies with the "fluffy cows,"  they can really mess you up, they' huge and dangerous, even if they look really mellow. 

As Southern Californians, we all know Catalina Island is out there, off shore, we've all seen it at some point, on a clear day.  Many people forget, or don't know that there are actually eight islands off of the Southern California coast.  At about 22 miles offshore, Santa Catalina is the closest, and can be reached by a couple of ferries from Long Beach, and by small planes or helicopters.  It's one of the four southern Channel Islands, the other three are Santa Barbara, San Clemente, and San Nicolas Islands.  San Clemente and San Nicolas are used by the military, and are off limits.  Santa Barbara is tiny, and part of the national park with the northern islands.  

So Santa Catalina, usually just called, Catalina, is the one we can all go visit.  The native tribes used to travel to all of these islands in small canoes for thousands of years.  A native woman named Juana Maria, was the last of the Nicoleno tribe on San Nicolas, and lived alone out there from 1835, until being removed in 1853.  

The four northern Channel Islands are west of Malibu, and south of the city of Santa Barbara.  Those four islands are named Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, San Miguel, and tiny Anacapa Island.  The four northern islands, and Santa Barbara Island, are part of the Channel Islands National Park.  You can learn a lot more about the islands, and take a virtual tour at the website on the link.  The Chumash tribe, native to the mainland around the Malibu area, also lived on some of the northern islands.  There is evidence of humans living on Santa Rosa Island as far back as 13,000 years ago, and 11,000 years ago on San Miguel.  So at the end of the last Ice Age, there were people on at least those two islands.  

Catalina is the one island with a small city, Avalon, and as I found out when we worked out there, it's really reasonable to stay there in the off season.  You can check out the Catalina/Avalon website for more info.  Catalina is also known for diving and fishing, and lots of SoCal boaters head out there for day or weekend trips.  Not only is Catalina the only place to see a heard of wild bison in Southern California, there's a lot more to do as well.  This post will give you links to get started to learn more about Catalina and the other Channel Islands.  You can also learn more at the Channel Islands Wikipedia page.

 

 

Kobe Bryant tribute murals in the Los Angeles area

This is a great video of 120 different Kobe Bryant murals in the Los Angeles area.  I ride the bus by the two story mural on the VEM Exotic (car) Rentals building, at 11459 Ventura Blvd, in Studio City, every day.  That's my favorite mural in this area.  That one is at 1:23 in this video.  

I was never a diehard basketball fan growing up.  I lived in Ohio as a kid at a time when all of the pro sports teams pretty much sucked.  The Cincinnati Reds were really good when I was about 4, and lived in that area.  But after that, the Indians and the Browns sucked, the Cavaliers were mediocre, and so were the Reds as I grew up.  My favorite basketball team as a kid was the Harlem Globetrotters. I never became a huge mainstream sports fan.

I got into BMX racing in freestyle while living in Boise, Idaho, when I was in high school, and it was BMX that brought me to Southern California, to work at two BMX magazines, in 1986.  I was totally into BMX, riding every night and on weekends, and rarely watched football, and never watched baseball in my 20's.  But the Lakers were a dynasty, and I'd catch a game on TV now and then.  

Then in 1996, they got this 18-year-old kid in a trade from the Charlotte Hornets.  Like most people, I thought, "Who does this kid think he is, skipping college and going straight to the pros?"  Like all newcomers, he made some mistakes here and there, but it was obvious, this kid, Kobe Bryant, was the real deal.  I started catching a lot more Lakers games as the 90's progressed into the Threepeat.  Kobe became my favorite basketball player of all time.  He was just a freaking amazing player, and legit guy, all around.  

So today's location for this post of Crazy California 43 is the huge Kobe and Gigi mural at 11459 Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, my favorite Kobe mural, and the one I see daily.  If you're a Kobe fan, the locations of 119 more Kobe murals are in the video above, go check some out in person.  

Kobe Bryant, obviously, is known for primarily, basketball, but he's a guy who's also won an Oscar and done many other things.  There are a few of my favorite Kobe Bryant videos I found while drawing a tribute picture of him, in my Sharpie Scribble Style.  Where is that drawing now?  I sold it to the guys as VEM Exotics, where my favorite mural is.  I hope it's on one of their walls inside.

Kobe's Top 50 NBA highlights - Watch this again.  Seriously.   Kobe's talent was off the chain.

Kobe and Shaq interview each other, years after playing together 

Kobe Bryant- Mamba Mentality- USC Performance Science Institute - I watched 30 or 40 hours of interviews of Kobe while drawing the drawing of him, this is my personal favorite interview I found of him.  I watched the whole thing three times, I think.

 Kobe Bryant- Up Close interview with Jimmy Kimmel

 TEDx Shaghai Salon- The Power of the Mind

 My favorite Kobe Bryant mural.  11459 Ventura Blvd, Studio City, #steveemigphotos

Close up of Kobe's face, in my tribute drawing of him.  #sharpiescribblestyle

Barris Kustoms: The King of the Custom Cars" shop is closing down

George Barris, the legendary car customizer, died in 2015.  The Barris Kustoms shop, located at 10811 Riverside drive in North Hollywood, California, has closed down now.  Here's a look at George Barris, and some of the crazy cars that came out of this shop.

Full disclosure, I'm not a diehard car guy.  But I am the son of one.  My dad was a draftsman and engineer from a small town in Ohio, who was a serious car guy and street racer in his younger years.  He owned three classic Ford T-Birds, a couple of Chevy Corvairs, and about 35 other cars and several motorcycles, before he got married.  I remember riding in my dad's last old car, a '55 Ford, when I was about 4 or 5 years old.  I also rode in a parade in Wadsworth, Ohio, in a T-bucket roadster with dad and his best friend Wilson, who built the car.  So like a lot of kids from the late Baby Boom and Gen X era, I grew up with my dad pointing and going, "Check out that car."  That love for buying, selling, modifying, and racing cars came from the early pioneers of American car culture.  One of the biggest names in that world is customizer George Barris.

Painting of the original Batmobile, on the window of Barris Kustoms.  #steveemigphotos

 

George Barris was born in 1925, and was the son of Greek immigrants.  He and his brother Sam, a year older, loved to build balsa wood models of cars, boats, and airplanes as kids, and entered them in local contests.  In high school, George and Sam were given a hand-me-down Buick in rough shape, and they customized it themselves, at a time when nobody really thought of driving cars that weren't stock.  The looks and reactions from kids at school, and the fun of creating something new out of an old car, got them believing they were on to something.  A few years later, George hopped in his '35 Ford and headed down to Hollywood.  George set up shop in the city of Bell, and later moved to Compton boulevard.  Brother Sam joined him in 1945, after completing his military service.  

The Beverly Hillbillies jalopy, my photo of their photo, on the front of the Barris Kustoms shop.

 

They customized cars for people in the hot rod and custom car world in the beginning.  George also wrote tech articles and shot photos that appeared in many car magazines, particularly Petersen magazines.  In 1961, his wife Shirley a new location in North Hollywood, just over the hill from Hollywood itself, but right in the middle of the Burbank, North Hollywood, and Studio City area of The Valley, where most movies and TV shows actually got made.  Soon Hollywood actors and personalities, as well as the studios themselves came calling, asking for custom cars to be built.  

Barris customized truck, photo on the front of their shop.

 

Perhaps the most famous car George is known for is the original Batmobile, built for the 1960's Batman TV show- Bam!-Klunk!-Kaplow!  George's custom cars became legendary around the world, to thousands of  hot rodders and street racers, and millions of kids watching Batman, and other shows like The Munsters.  Barris Kustoms built the Munster Koach, and Grandpa's Dragula for The Munsters TV show.  The Dragula was a casket turned into a dragster.  Barris also designed an built the Beverly Hillbillies overloaded jalopy, James Dean's Porsche Spyder, a car for the Banana Splits kids' show, they modified cars for The Dukes of Hazard, and designed and built KITT from the Knight Rider TV show, along with many, many others.  

 A crazy six wheeled ATV, again my photo of a photo on the front of the Barris Kustoms shop.

George's wife Shirley passed away in 2001, and George himself got called by a higher power to customize some cars in the afterlife in 2015.  The surviving family members kept the business going since then, keeping the huge legacy of George and Barris Kustoms alive through car shows, media, and other events.  They haven't customized any more cars since George's death.  So now the legendary location of the shop is up for sale.  Several of George's cars were donated to the Petersen museum years ago, in Los Angeles, and are on display there.  The thousands of photos, posters, die cast cars, and other mementos in the Barris collection will probably wind up on display in a new location at some point.  No word on that yet.  For the moment, as I write this, (Sept. 4, 2021) the Barris Kustoms shop still has photos  of several cars on the front, and a mock-up Batmobile, and James Dean Spyder replica, and the Munster Koach are still visible through the shop windows.  So that's today's interesting location here in Crazy California 43 blog, a shop that expanded everyone's ideas of what a car or truck can be, for well over 50 years.  

The Batmobile revealed- with George Barris

Motor Mavens interview with George Barris (2011?)   

"Hot Rod Herman" - The Munster Coach on The Munsters

Grandpa builds and races Drag-u-la on The Munsters

Knight Rider TV show intro, featuring KITT car, built by Barris Kustoms 

A walkaround video of several of the classic Barris Kustoms cars and creations, taped in 2016, shortly after George Barris' death.

 

Grandpa's casket turned dragster, the Dragula, from The Munsters TV show.  My photo of the photo on the front of their shop.

All good things must come to an end.  Around the corner from the Barris Kustoms shop is this mural of the Batmobile, painted on the concrete culvert wall.  #steveemigphotos

The Oceanview flyout BMX jump

This is my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Go to 23:21 in this video for the segment at the Oceanview jump.  

In 1990, BMX was in a crazy period.  The sport had "died" in 1989, as major corporations pulled out of the 1980's "fad" of BMX racing, and the new trick riding thing called BMX freestyle.  The bike industry itself decided in 1989 that BMX was "over" and pulled their support away from all things BMX, and plunged their money into mountain bikes, which are, of course, adult sized BMX bikes.  Nearly all freestylers in the 80's raced for a while, before getting into freestyle.  But BMX racing was racing, and most racers did some dirt jumping.  Freestyle, the trick riding aspect of the sport, had evolved a separate type of bikes, heavier, with framestanders and axle pegs.  By late 1990, when this video came out, flatland and quarterpipe contests had existed for six years, halfpipe contests for 3 years, and street contests for only 2 years.  Wall rides had only been a thing for 3 1/2 years.  Flatland riding evolved into scuffing then into forward rolling tricks, led by Kevin Jones and the Plywood Hoods.  It was fading in popularity, but more difficult than ever.

Vert riding was going from quarterpipes to halfpipes.  There were no concrete skateparks... ANYWHERE... in California.  I think Kona in Florida was the only one left.  This video was the first to have mini-ramps in it, they were a brand new thing that skaters had started making.  Street riding was the new trend, and most BMX videos by bike companies still had riders wearing leathers.  The sport of BMX freestyle had gone underground, the posers were gone, and the progression of the sport was happening at a fast pace.  Guys like Mat Hoffman and Dennis McCoy didn't even have factory sponsors at times in 1989.  The world had left BMX for dead, the money was gone from the sport.  But we kept riding... and progressing.

Jumping had been a part of BMX riding since the very beginning, starting with kids on Schwinn Stingrays in the early 1970's. But by 1990, there were two schools of jumping.  Racer/jumpers preferred double jumps,with some distance involved, and their tricks were mostly one handers, and one hand one footers, things like that.  Hardly any racers could do 360's.  The exception were the crazy young guys on the S&M Bikes team, a garage company at the time, led by Chris Moeller.  They were pushing the level of jumping to new highs, and crazier tricks.  

The other kind of jumping at the time was freestyler jumping, usually on flyout jumps.  Some were ditch jumps where you rolled in one side, and out the other.  Some flyout jumps were where you pedaled to a tall jump, 6-7 feet high, and popped straight up.  Freestyle jumpers didn't go far, or very high, but these jumps gave you hang time over a flat landing, time to try really weird new tricks.  So while the racers were jumping farther and higher, freestylers were jumping smaller, but working more on weird new tricks.  In time, the two types of jumping blended, and the trails riders that emerged in the early 1990's took the freestylers' crazy tricks, like 360's, one hander no footers, nothings, and tailwhips, and soon after backflips, and did them bigger, over doubles.  

Throughout 1990, the Oceanview flyout jump in Huntington Beach was one of the places a bunch of the Orange County based riders would show up and push the limits of new tricks.  This jump was in the front yard of Oceanview High School in Huntington Beach, at the corner of Warner and Gothard streets.  I'm not sure who built it, but it was the perfect place.  We had a concrete runway to a 6 1/2 high jump to flat, under the shade of this huge tree.  The recent new Jersey immigrant, and hungry and then unknown rider, Keith Treanor, flat out ruled Oceanview at the time.  That's why a silhouette of Keith jumping over John's upstretched arm was on the cover of this video.  

The riders in this segment are Keith Treanor (23:32), John Povah (23:36), GT vert pro Josh White (23:49), recently retired pro Woody Itson (23: 51), and H.B. local flatlander Andy Mulcahy (24: 03).  As small as this jumping seems in today's world, this was cutting edge freestyle jumping for its day.  No handers, one hand no footers, and nothings were all pretty new tricks, very few people were trying them.  When this footage was shot, decade jumps had not been invented yet, and no one had done a tailwhip on dirt, as far as we knew.  The tailwhip attempt that Josh White runs away from in this clip he followed by landing his first tailwhip on dirt ever.  My camera battery died, and it shut off, while he was in the air.  I missed the shot of Josh White's first tailwhip.  Right about the same time, the Spring of 1990, Mike Krnaich landed a tailwhip on a tiny box jump, and that became the first tailwhip jump ever in a video, when the Bully Bikes video came out.  Josh wanted to kill me for missing the shot of his first tailwhip, and I never saw him out jumping again, so I never got that shot.  

So, as small as this jumping seems in today's world, the sessions that happened almost every night at the Oceanview High flyout jump in 1990, were really pushing the new tricks in jumping at the time. The four or five sessions I shot video of, combined in this clip, recorded those tricks, and motivated riders of the day to push the limits of jumping even farther.  In the P.O.W. House and Edison section inthis video, you can see the racer/jumpers like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer and Mike " Crazy Red" Carlson.  Right around that time, jumping contests at some BMX races were starting to happen, which began to turn dirt jumping into its won genre' of BMX.  

And just for the record right before this clip, at 23:17, you see a guy doing a double peg grind on a ledge.  That's me, and that shot, to the best of my knowledge, it the 2nd double peg street grind ever in a BMX video, and the first on a ledge.  In Ride Like a Man, produced by Eddie Roman for 2-Hip, which came out a couple months before my video, Dennis McCoy does a double peg grind on a rail next to a walkway.  My grind here is the second double peg grind in a video.  And later in this video, Keith Treanor does the first double peg grind down a rail over a small set of stairs, and John Povah does the first ice pick grind on a rail.  That's how new street riding was then, fundamental tricks were being invented all over in that era of 1989-1991, and every video had some "first ever" tricks back then.  

In the many years since 1990, Oceanview High School became a big skating spot in the 1990's, and "The Ashtray," the first public skatepark in California, was built a couple hundred yards away in Murdy Park.  Later on, the high school did a major expansion, and built over the area where the flyout jump used to be.  But this spot was one that helped pushed new tricks in BMX in the late 1980's and early 1990's, adding to the evolution of BMX during the "dead" years of the early 1990's.

If you look through this gate, there's a window back there, about five feet off the ground.  That's about where the Oceanview flyout jump used to be.  This is the 20,000 or so square foot addition to the front of Oceanview High School. #steveemigphotos

This is the front of Oceanview High School now, looking from the corner of Warner and Gothard.  The big tree next to the jump was about where the building is now, about the center of this photo.  #steveemigphotos.

So 

The Alley Studios building

At 5066 Vineland in North Hollywood, there's a boarded up storefront.  For 43 years, that building was home to The Alley rehearsal and recording studios.  Bands rented it by the week.  Kind of like Fight Club, the first rule was not to tell anyone about it.  The next rules were no photos, no film, no videos inside... ever.  From 1973 to 2016, bands rehearsed there, and recorded albums there.  It was called The Alley, studio and rehearsal hall.  

It doesn't look like much from the outside.  Musicians entered from the alley in the back, hence the name, The Alley.  Michael Jackson recorded four albums here.  Prince recorded two.  Jackson Browne told owner Shiloh he wrote her favorite song, "For Everyman," in this building.  The Alley was there and in operation long before the area became North Hollywood's NoHo Arts District.  #steveemigphotos

 Don Henley once said that the epic Eagles song, "Hotel California," was about the transition from innocence to experience."  The Alley was a place for artists to hide out, and be artists.  Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, and all that it meant to be a big band in the 1970's, and beyond, happened inside this building.  Legend has it that the scene at the Alley was the initial inspiration for the Eagles writing "Hotel California."  As best anyone can tell, over 1,800 hits were written or recorded in the non-descript building.  The piano that was in the rehearsal studio until 2020 is said to have belonged to Gram Parsons.  The Red Hot Chili Peppers auditioned 3,000 guitar players there in the 1990's, before going with Dave Navarro, who they'd pretty much already settled on anyway. 

Three Dog Night.  Paul McCartney.  Bob Marley. Tom Petty,  Motorhead, Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Fleetwood Mac.  Little Feat.  Warren Zevon.  Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.  Deep Purple. Jackson Browne.  The Eagles.  Black Sabbath.  Santana.  Stevie Wonder.  Roy Orbison.  K.D. Lang.  Bonnie Raitt.  Sheryl Crow.  Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins.  The Interrupters, Lucinda Williams, and on and on.  Hundreds, probably thousands, of the greatest musicians of the last 50 years practiced, wrote, hung out, jammed, and recorded music in this building.  Even in Hollywood, The Alley studios were legendary, but a secret at the same time.  The Alley was a place where musicians could be musicians, close off from the outside world, and let the magic happen.

To top it off, there are even ghost hunters who have put the building on TV.  At least one man died there, in a fall down the spiral staircase.  Supposedly there are ghost cats roaming the building as well.  

The brick walls with the musician and band signatures would probably go for tens of thousands of dollars to rich collectors if pulled out and sold.  Sometimes the great places in history are hiding right in plain sight.  Like Diagon Alley in Harry Potter, you had to be one of the chosen, the hardcore musicians, to enter this building between 1973 and 2016.  

It started in 1965, and a biker named Bill Elkins came there to shoot photos of Three Dog Night in 1972.  All of his friends were musicians and Harley type bikers.  He just had to own the place, and waited for it to go up for sale.  When it finally did, he tore down the For Sale sign so no one else would see it, and called the owner.  Bill bought the building, and started using scrap lumber he scrounged to build it into a rehearsal hall and recording studio in 1973.  He met Shiloh in the 70's, they married, and lived in the small apartment at the back of the property.  He built the business with word of mouth from band to band, musician to musician.  That kept the place busy for 43 years, from 1973 to 2016.  Bill died in 2015, and Shiloh died in 2017.  The Alley closed in 2016.  They had no children, so there were no heirs to pass it on to.  

One time Alley technician, John Strand, tried to get The Alley going again, but had financial and other issues, and had to sell it.  Here are a couple of the better videos that do exist from The Alley Studios.

2015 interview with Shiloh Elkins by a young woman from Ghost Cult Magazine -22 minutes

Spectrum News 1 (L.A.) News report from 2020- 4 1/2 minutes

Recording "Crying" with Roy Orbison and K.D. Lang at The Alley 

The music video: "Crying" Roy Orbison and K.D. Lang ( music/vocals partially recorded at The Alley)

Save The Alley video- 2019

Little Feat playing "Long Distance Love," believed to be in The Alley in the 1970's.

Red Hot Chili Peppers jamming in The Alley in 1990 

Ghost Adventures promo in The Alley- 2019

Slab City: That last lawless place in the U.S.?

Actors Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart talk about shooting their duet scene at "The Slabs" for the 2007 movie Into the Wild.  The movie, based on a John Krakaur book, is about Christopher McCandless, an smart student and athlete, who wandered away from society seeking his own answers, and eventually died in Alaska.  This scene was actually shot at Slab City.

I was talking to a friend who's into off road racing trucks, about this blog.  I said something like, "You go out to Ocotillo, right?  Have you ever been out to the big metal sculptures at Borrego Springs?" He said he had, and I told him I wrote a blog post about those.  We got talking about the Southern California desert, and I told him about the legends of the ship in desert.  He hadn't heard that legend, but it sounded interesting.  Then he said, "and there's that lawless place out there, too, by the Salton Sea."  I wasn't sure what he was talking about.  Then it clicked, "Slab City?"  He said that was the place.  That seems to be the way people think of Slab City, those who have heard of it, or maybe visited it, it's "that lawless place."  

Slab City got its name because there are a whole bunch of concrete slabs out there, making nive flat places to park a camper, or built your own house of some sort in a place no one really cares about.  At least most of the time.  The slabs are the remnants of a retired Marine Corps camp's gunnery range.

I first heard about Slab City in the movie Into the Wild.  I later read the book, and it stuck in my mind.  I was working as a taxi driver in Orange County in 2007, and once or twice a week I'd go see a movie in the early afternoon, as much to escape the heat as to watch any particular movie.  Into the Wild was one of the most fascinating movies I saw back then.  

I was living in my taxi, working 7 days a week, 16-18 hours most days, just struggling to pay my $550 a week taxi lease.  The idea of wandering off into the wild sounded pretty good at the time.  The taxi business was going downhill, due to the computer dispatching system, which allowed taxi companies to put far too many cabs on the road for the amount of business that existed.  

On Thanksgiving weekend, 2007, I finally hit the point where I wasn't going to make my lease by the next Monday.  Totally burnt out, grossly overweight, and not sure what to do with my life, I decided to take a drive that Sunday morning.  My goal was to find Slab City, just to check the place out.  I didn't work that Saturday night, I felt kind of sick.  So I woke up about 4:00 am.  I headed south on the 5 freeway, and then east on route 78.  Around dawn, I pulled off in a little area in the Anzo Borrego State Park, and took a short hike on a trail there.  I got back in my cab, and headed east, until I hit route 86, on the west side of the Salton Sea, California's largest lake, and one of the craziest stories in the state.  But that's a tale for another day.

I had a computer in the pawn shop, that I bought just to edit video with, but I never got on the internet then, so I had no idea exactly where Slab City was, I just knew it was somehwere near the Salton Sea, which is like 30 miles long.  I drove north, got some breakfast near a casino, and asked a couple people where Slab City was.  I went out to the edge of the once popular, now dying Salton Sea, where the bones of millions of dead fish scatter the shore.  I headed south, taking tips from a local, but never found Slab City.  It was getting hot out, so I headed back up to Orange County.  

The next morning I dropped off my taxi at the company, simply dropped the keys at the window, and walked away with my small backpack and about $15.  My health was so bad, after three bouts of cellulitis in my legs that year, that I didn't expect to live more than a few weeks on the street.  I wound up living on the streets of Orange County for nearly a year.  

I've still never been to Slab City. I saw a cool TV show where some skaters went out there and built a mini skatepark, and skated for a few days.  There are several videos on YouTube about the place, I'll link some below.  

The basic story is that the place was built as Camp Dunlap, a Marine Corps training base in 1942, during World War II.  It was functional and used for three years, then dropped down to a skeleton crew.  According to Wikipedia, the big area of concrete slabs was part of the artillery range.  When it was abandoned, a few drifters set up camp there.  A few more came along, and it became a squatters community of people moving in and out, including many snowbirds from northern areas, coming in the winter.  The Department of Defense gave the land to the state of California in 1961 officially.  

Slab City is pretty close to the middle of fucking nowhere, which is a great place to go if you want to "get away from it all."  It's east of the southern end of the Salton Sea, off route 111, near Niland.  It's in Imperial county, part of the Sonoran desert, and temperatures can reach a toasty 122 degrees F in the summer.  

It's generally seen as a place where the government didn't care about, so people could live  cheap with basically no laws.  Anarchy in the desert.  Since I've found it interesting, but never been there, I'll let the people from Slab City tell their stories, in the links below.  I also recommend the movie Into the Wild, and The Salton Sea (which is about meth,so MAJOR trigger alert if you're a recovering tweeker).

Last Free Place in America (52 minutes)

Inside Slab City (from Vice- 22 minutes)

Lawless Slab City (The Roi's VLOG 21 minutes)

The Real Local resident of Slab City (2021- 37 minutes)

Exploring East Jesus- Slab City (12 minutes)

Salvation Mountain (9 minutes)

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Crazy California 43's Guide to Huntington Beach

The Huntington Beach Pier at dusk.  #steveemigphotos

Huntington Beach was an oil well filled, mellow surf town, with the only long stretch of wide open beach in SoCal, when I moved there in 1987.  As many cities struggled for a variety or reasons, H.B. kept growing and getting more and more built up and developed.  Most of the old oil pumps have been taken down, and the wells capped, and it's a bustling beach town for trendy people now.  But it hasn't totally forgotten its action sports roots.  Since I live din H.B. for the better part of 20 years, several of the early posts in this blog are locations in Huntington Beach, starting with the iconic pier.  Here are links to my posts about H.B., more posts will be added as time goes on.

Classic Surf Spot: The Huntington Beach Pier

Classic Skate Spot: The Huntington Beach Pier

Classic BMX Spot: The Huntington Beach Pier

The Ashtray: the tiny skatepark that made all public skateparks in California possible 

Lloyd Wright's tombstone... for an idea 

 Huntington Beach jail cells from the 1920's

Classic BMX Spot: Sheep Hills  (OK, technically Costa Mesa, but it's on the border) 

Classic BMX Spot: The Old Surf Theater parking lot 

Classic BMX Spot: The Blues Brothers Wall 

The Duke Kahanamoku statue in front of Huntington Surf & Sport, on the corner of PCH and Main in downtown Huntington Beach.  #steveemigphotos