Back when I first got to San Francisco in the mid-90s, full of youthful idealism, the first thing I did was seek out the San Francisco Cacophony Society and their best-known offspring, the Burning Man festival and the nascent subculture that surrounded it. Well, no, the first thing I did was spend 3 years of my late 20s cocooned at the Green Tortoise Adventure Travel office & youth hostel, where I lived and worked, venturing out only to cavort in the surrounding North Beach neighborhood with the poets and the blues musicians. But after three years of that—straight out to explore what San Francisco's modern counterculture had to offer, without delay.

But well prior to that, in September 1997, a bunch of us Tortoise employees borrowed a bus from them—great perk of working for an adventure tour bus operator—and went out for a long…