There's a lot of cool and random stuff out in the desert. This guy tools around on an ebike looking at the old junk in this section of Nevada, outside Las Vegas. In the last part of the video he checks out an abandoned casino and hotel. For real. And they are still full of furnishings. That's pretty crazy.
Until I was almost 14 years old, "the desert" was a mythical place where cowboys used to herd cattle, and have gunfights in old movies. I grew up in the very green and moist state of Ohio. There were creeks small rivers, medium sized rivers, and big ass rivers like the Ohio River, all over the state where my family bounced around during my childhood. All of the rivers had water in them all year 'round, because that's what a river is, right? Rivers are never ending places of running water.
Then word got around that the company my dad worked at might get sold, and possibly shut down. That rumor began to circulate in 1979, and up until about 1978, factories simply didn't shut down. They just didn't, it was unheard of. But about a year earlier, one had closed in a nearby town, and then moved the whole plant to a faraway place where people worked for less money... Alabama. That was the beginning of the mass closings of factories in the U.S., where tens of millions of human jobs were either replaced by industrial robots and other new technology, or they were outsourced to another state or another country. That mass closing of factories in the 1980's through the 2000's turned the Midwest from the Industrial heart of the U.S. into the Rust Belt we known now. My family got out of Ohio early, not realizing how big the trend would become. In the summer of 1980 we moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico.
I was a chubby, wimpy white boy who was suddenly was entering 9th grade in a city that was 70% Hispanic. Orale ese! I learned a lot of things during that year we lived in southeastern New Mexico. I learned that chicken fried steak, steak fingers, tamales, and guacamole were all good things. I learned not to order mountain oysters at a restaurant. I learned that the Pecos River was muddy, "too thick to drink and too thin to plow," was the local joke. Yet both trout and gar somehow lived in the brown water. I learned not to camp in a sand wash, because if it rains somewhere upstream, a debris flow can happen unexpectedly. I learned that some rivers don't have water running in them most of the year. I learned not to step on cholla spines. I learned "spelunking" is another word for cave exploring, which is big in Carlsbad, home of the Carlsbad Caverns. I learned how to do the Latino "what's up" up nod to say "Hi" to friends, without words. I saw Roswell before anyone talked about aliens, the book that blew that story up came out in 1981, while I lived there.
I also learned that there is all kinds of crazy stuff out in the desert, pretty much any desert, I think. While I had trouble dealing with the summer heat as a chubby kid in Carlsbad, I loved wandering around the desert on the weekends in the fall, winter, and spring, looking for random stuff. I looked for turquoise colored, and the more rare purple, glass insulators from the old power lines. They were clear originally, but something in the glass made then change colors over many years while out in the sun. An unchipped one was a desert treasure, and many lined window sills in Carlsbad.
At that time, there was a book of aerial photos you could buy of each county, from an obscure government office, for $4. My dad's co-workers scoured those books for interesting looking stuff to go find out in the desert. They found some 1/4 mile wide circles way out in the desert, with smaller, concentric circles inside. Those turned out to be World War II Army Air Force bombing practice targets. So we went out nearly every weekend that winter to explore those things.
We found hundreds pieces of both metal and concrete practice bombs, pieces of hundreds of them. These were 100 pound practice bombs, maybe 8 or 9 inches in diameter, and about three feet long. The concrete ones were solid concrete, with metal fins bolted on the back end. The metal ones were the same size and shape, but were steel filled with either sand or gravel. They were all broken, and big pieces were hard to find. But some of the concrete ones still had the light blue color on the parts that had been buried, and white stenciled writing on them. There were 45 or more of those targets out in the desert in Southeastern New Mexico. After months of collecting practice bombs, we finally found a little magazine article, from many years before, that explained the basic story. During World War II, from 1943-1945, one of the U.S. Army Air Force's bombardier and navigator training centers was located in Carlsbad. Even a local historian we met didn't know that, so we told her what we had found. Now there's the Wikipedia page about it, linked above.
On one of our trips to find one of these targets, we found a bunch of foundations for houses, like an early 20th century little village, of maybe 100 people. It was just out in the middle of nowhere. In a bit of synchronicity, our next door neighbor lady, who was in her 70's, knew exactly what it was. My dad mentioned it over the fence, detailing where it was. "Oh, that's Getty," she said, "It was a little home for oil rig workers in the 1930's, I lived out there for a couple of years." That was a really random coincidence. Since those days, as a junior high kid in 1980-81, I've loved just wandering different places in the desert, just to see what there is to find. My point is, there's all kinds of weird stuff out in the desert, and because of the arid environment, things don't get overgrown, and things last a long time, for decades, even hundreds of years.
In this video above, this explorer rides around this area on his ebike, and finds a bunch of the more normal stuff you find in desert areas of the West. Old cans, trash pits from 50 or 100 years ago, part of a glass insulator, turned turquoise by years in the sun, and similar old bits and pieces. Then he finds what appears to be a dead, rattlesnake, a pretty big one. Then he rides back to where he started, which is an abandoned casino and hotel, closed in 2020. That's pretty crazy. It's in Jean, Nevada, on the 15 freeway, south of Las Vegas.
This video reminded me of all the time I've spent wandering pieces of desert, when it popped up on my YouTube feed. So I thought I'd do a post about it. A lot of my early BMXing in 1982 and 1983, in the trailer park outside of Boise, was riding my bike around the Jeep trails in the miles of desert where I lived, to see what was out there. There was a filled in water well and rock walls, what we thought might be part of an old Pony Express stop, near the trailer park, among other stuff. Anyhow, this is just a cool little exploration video, something I haven't really had the chance to do in a long time.
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