Throwback Thursday

Mexican Red Hair Cannabis

If you want to look back and examine the past, you better be ready. Like it or not, the past is never past. Look back with aplomb and revel in it, good or bad. There are lessons to be learned if you can unearth them, if you can dredge them out of the frozen waters of your mind and guide them to the surface. Like the 50 bales of Mexican Red Hair hauled up from the depths of Lower Merced Pass Lake in the backcountry of Yosemite in California, extracted from a downed airplane in the winter of 1967 and smoked with abandon amid gassy fireworks at Camp 4.

Nirvana

To the victor belong the spoils. When there is no one left standing but yourself, you either take what is left behind or you leave it. Up to you. But you cannot repeat, cannot let good pot go to waste. No way. So you take as much as you can carry and run. Free pot, come and get it. Bales and bales. Just waiting for you to get your hands on it. Nirvana, right? Oh shit, yeah!

6,000 Pounds

The climbers living at Camp 4 in Yosemite during the winter of 1976 became aware of an airplane crash high up in the mountains at Lower Merced Pass Lake. A plane laden with bales of pot went down in the mountains on a drug run. 6,000 pounds of marijuana was stashed onboard. Or so legend has it. The climbers weren’t the first to find out, though. The Yosemite park rangers and the DEA learned of the crash and, before the winter got too severe, went up in a helicopter and decided to confiscate the contraband. Like the remnants of dinosaur bones, part of the wreckage lay strewn along the shoreline where the plane hit, then tumbled into the lake, sinking up to its nose.

The strand was littered with bales of pot, and the rangers collected these first and stashed them in the helicopter. Then, with chainsaws in tow, they ventured out onto the frozen lake and cut holes through the ice near the plane and managed, with the help of divers, to extract a few more gunny-sacked bales of marijuana. When the weather began to deteriorate, the rangers had to abandon their mission. But their job was far from over. More bales remained lodged in the submerged fuselage of the plane. They intended to return in the spring to pick up the remainder of the pot, thinking no one in their right mind would dare venture up into the backcountry in the dead of winter. The rangers left the wreckage and the two dead pilots in the ice and took off with what they had gotten. They stored the stash at the Yosemite firehouse, which also served as a jail, and went about their business as usual managing the park.

Lodestar Lightning

Some say the plane that crashed was a Lodestar Lightning PV-1 Ventura. Others say it was a Howard 500. Seems no one really knows. Myth has a way of verging into truth, and vice versa. Regardless, the aircraft originated in the Baja in Mexico, bound for the Black Rock Deserta hundred or so miles from Reno, Nevada. When the starboard engine fell off as the pilots throttled up over a ridge in the High Sierra, the plane soon followed the engine and crashed into the lake.

Dope Lake

The Stonemasters found out about the crash and the incredible amounts of pot stashed inside the plane. So after the rangers had finished, they began to make trips up into the high country. Being top climbers in top shape, they were well-conditioned to survive the inclement winter weather. Still, the winter had been warmer than usual, and this helped them in their quest to score the bales of pot. After their first visit, they consequently named Lower Merced Pass Lake “Dope Lake.” Trip after trip, in secrecy, saw them haul back bales of pot out of the backcountry. Some say 200 bundles of the magic stuff was removed, each weighing around 50 pounds.

The Heist Masters

The Stonemasters had to cut through the ice after they reached their destination. The holes the rangers had cut were now frozen shut. Using ice axes — and regular axes — they got through and were able to pull out bales from the fuselage. The going was rough, though. Airplane fuel saturated the water around the plane. One by one, the bales were removed and taken back down to Camp 4, hidden carefully where the authorities couldn’t find them — if they came looking. Which they didn’t.

The Yosemite Gold Rush

Most of the climbers, if not all, were dirt poor. Some of the Stonemasters called themselves the Dirtbags. But they reveled in their poverty, throwing off all pretense about money, choosing to live like they lived — out on the edge. Questioning authority at every turn. This is where they wanted to be — in Camp 4, not beholden to society at large. Still, money is money, money is power and money buys material goods such as climbing gear, which is expensive. Money also buys time, as well. Some of the climbers took their pot and went down to LA and San Francisco, where they sold their wares. With their newfound wealth, some ended up buying houses, others used it for college tuition, some gave it away. Others smoked their shares down to the sticks and were left with nothing except the experience, which, to them, was the whole point of the operation.

Fire-Brewed Pot

When they got the pot down off the mountain, they of course partook of the stash, the Mexican Red Hair, blowing the tops of their heads off in more ways than one. More than a few of the bales were saturated with airplane fuel, but that didn’t stop the Stonemasters from having their due. When they lit up, the joints would sometimes explode or flare up, singeing the smokers’ hair and beards. The pot tasted of gasoline and tar, but this didn’t thwart the Dirtbags. It still got you off, adding to the wild experience of living on the edge,living around the campfire, partying with friends. Or attached to a rope on the vertical walls 2,000 feet up on the Dawn Wall of El Capitan, lighting up the fuel-laden joints that exploded around their heads. From the base you could look up and see the flares, and you knew they were having a good time.

Smoke it if You Can

No one was ever caught or prosecuted. The rangers never found the climbers’ stash. By the time they learned the bales were missing, the climbers had already smoked or sold it. The Stonemasters had beaten the rangers and the DEA at their own game. To the Dirtbags belong the spoils of a good high — and the money to go along with it. Like a pirate wreckage plundered by the inhabitants of a coastal town in the 1600s, the plane was stripped of the contraband and distributed among those at Camp 4. They dared to look down into the icy waters and find fortune smiling back at them in bale after bale of Mexican Red Hair, ready and waiting to be smoked or sold. It is as true today as it was back then. The past is never past. Go and smoke it — if you dare.

The post Throwback Thursday: The Great Yosemite Pot Heist appeared first on DOPE Magazine.

Throwback Thursday: The Great Yosemite Pot Heist
Source: Dope Magazine

“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains,” says Bilbo in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “and then find somewhere I can rest. In peace and quiet … ”And I might add, for myself primarily, to partake in a good toke — or two or three. Not from a pipe piled high with the Hobbits’ Longbottom Leaf or Old Toby, but from my Dopen 2.0, filled with a smooth, free-flowing sativa winding its way down into my lungs. Throw in a swig or two from a jug of Gallo Paisano Wine, a big old dog huffing and puffing at my side, and I’m suddenly free of all the BS mankind throws at me. Yes, I want to escape from the bane of civilization in whatever way I can. That’s how I felt in the ‘60s and how I feel today. Wanted to get out from under all of it and onto the road to find my way along the way. And back then I did, and still do. Mountains, I need mountains. Bilbo lives.

Climbing Out of the ‘50s

The first new wave of climbers to descend on Yosemite arrived in the late ‘50s, ascended its storied walls throughout the ‘60s, then into the ‘70s. They embraced the counterculture. In fact, they werethe counterculture, escaping from authority and all the rules and regulations society imposed on them and the rest of us. These outlaws of the rock tuned in, turned on and dropped out, ending up in Yosemite Valley at Camp 4, rejecting all that society stood for. Question authority.

Camp 4

Camp 4 was their home away from home for many years, changing only when new climbers with new values came to join them and take up residence. It was one of the farthest campsites away from the tourists, situated in the rear of the campground near a rock wall and boulders where the climbers could practice and party. The wild parties, fired by weed, acid and booze, alienated the climbers from the pampered tourists, who were housed comfortably in their cocooned motorhomes with all the amenities of home: refrigerators, stoves, queen beds and TVs. The tourists, of course, complained about the loud music and mad hijinks to who else? The authorities. All this back-and-forth fueled an ongoing fight over the years throughout the ‘60s — between the tourists, climbers and the U.S. Park Service.

The Crazies

I’ve climbed many mountains in my time, burning up the gentler grades and occasionally glued to a steeper pitch with ropes. I’ve never been on one of the big walls of Yosemite, though, much less stoned 3,000 feet up suspended by ropes, staring down into the vertical abyss. Yes, there were those that drank and smoked (and were stoned and drunk most of the time) while putting up some of the most successful routes American climbing had ever seen. Before the crazies arrived, there were other less crazed individuals that migrated from the cities in the early ‘60s and planted themselves in the valley to put up radical climbs that had never been seen or done before. I knew some of the crazies, though, and even though I was crazy back then, too, I would never follow them up those crooked paths into the far reaches of the sky. Stoned.

Stay Stoned, My Friend

I preferred to stay planted on the ground in front of a roaring bonfire, drinking and smoking or staying home and drinking and smoking, never setting foot on one of those towering walls that seemed to abnegate the sunlight. I preferred watching them take off and climb, wiped out of their minds. How they could do this, I didn’t know. I’d only been stoned hiking to the top of 14,000-foot peaks. Not vertical walls. Stay stoned, my friends. With two feet on the ground.

Royal Robbins vs. Warren Harding

Royal Robbins was one of the first to come to the valley. Although he wasn’t much of a party animal, like so many others who accompanied him, he was an integral part of the counterculture, dropping out and staying in Yosemite in the early ‘60s. He pioneered clean climbing, one without drilling bolts to clip your rope into unless you absolutely needed to. Robbins was a rival to Warren Harding, a surveyor nicknamed “Batso” who climbed with abandon, lived for days on the sides of rock walls with abandon, drank with abandon and smoked with abandon. Harding was the first to scale the 3,000-foot wall called The Nose on El Capitan. But it was the way in which he climbed that irked most of the other climbers, especially Robbins. Harding attacked the wall in siege fashion with fixed ropes that one could climb back up and down on like a freeway and thus renew the route the next day, until slowly, over time, you got to the top. It took Harding and his companions two years to complete the route. Harding thumbed his nose at authority along the way, guzzling wine and smoking bongs 2,000 feet up on the wall. Later, Robbins, to prove his adversary wrong, climbed the Nose, which took him a week. Without fixed ropes.

Jim Bridwell and the Stonemasters

Then came Jim Bridwell and his band of hardmen and hardwomen stoners. They called themselves The Stonemasters and, as Lynn Hill, one of their prominent members, said in the film “Valley Uprising,” The Stonemasters should have been called the “stoned masters.” That’s when things got crazy. Not only the way Bridwell partied, but climbed, usually stoned or on acid, saying that he climbed on the edge of being stoned and totally out of his mind. He and his band of merry climbers put up routes Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard, another pioneer (and founder of the clothing company Patagonia) could only dream about. Was it the pot? Might have been.

Between Sanity and Darkness

To climb or not to climb? To smoke or not to smoke while climbing? Do the two go together? For some they do, and they say it makes them climb better, keeps them on the knife’s edge. For others like me, no. I didn’t have the stomach to climb stoned. I’d lose my marbles and watch them bounce off the rocks all the way down the cliff face. It would be too hair-raising, as some of the participants have said when they followed their fearless leader, Bridwell, up into the lofty heights, as he tripped on acid, dangling on the edge of sanity and darkness. There is only one exit if you fall three thousand feet.

Talking to the Ents

I want to be in the mountains, sitting on a rock with a dog beside me, both of us overlooking a peaceful valley, me having a good, long hit from my Dopen 2.0 and filling my lungs with a glow that travels up to my head and beyond. The dog, he’ll get some good clean fresh air. I’ll lean back against a tree, preferably into the branches of an Ent,and have a conversation with him about the untoward wiles and ways of the world, the beauties of the forest and solitude, happy to be away from it all with the dog and the tree and my imagination sailing in the breezes. That’s what I want, what I desire. Hyggein the great outdoors. The crazies hung out with my younger self, a self that today, although still young at heart, has paled into a wan evening sunset, with my crazier self looking down at me from the fading light beyond the mountaintop. The road goes ever on. Bilbo lives.

Up Next: The Climbers and the Great Pot Heist

The post Throwback Thursday: Early Climbing Counterculture in the Yosemite Valley appeared first on DOPE Magazine.

Throwback Thursday: Early Climbing Counterculture in the Yosemite Valley
Source: Dope Magazine