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Subterranean SF: Fort Mason Tunnel
This is a placeholder to remind me to post the photo album of exploring the hidden Fort Mason rail tunnel.
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Everybody says she’s the brains behind Pa: Wendee’s Farm
This is a placeholder page to remind me to post my gallery of photos from Wendee Key's plantation.
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Life On Mars?: The Red Day
2020, already a strange year due to the pandemic, had its strangest day, for the San Francisco area, on September 9. The Bay Area experienced a kind of weather that few people ever see.
I woke up that morning thinking it was dawn… from where I'd slept, through the windows I could see the sky beginning to lighten, although it was about the reddest dawn I've ever seen. But I got up and looked at the clock—and it was after 9 AM. I couldn't understand what I was seeing. I literally got dizzy with the unreality of it.
I looked back and forth from the clock to the window several times. Finally I got online to see if the world was ending, and it turned out to be thick smoke from forest first up in Northern CA blanketing the bay area, reducing visibility to dusk levels at midday…
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Going Down...: Beneath Hawk Hill—Exploring underground Battery 129, Marin Headlands
Many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, as I was simultaneously just breaking into and away from the San Francisco underground art scene, some folks I used to run with said elusive phantom stranger John Law had called for a bunch of us to meet up for mysterious purposes, as he was wont to do.
Hopping into some cars that night, we caravaned out along the twisty road into the Marin Headlands, parking some distance from Hawk Hill and walking there under cover of night. Once we arrived at the observation platform on top of the hill, someone produced a shovel and began to dig in the dirt, down a foot or two until hitting a rock. We pulled the rock out, and, to my surprise, underneath was an overturned 5-gallon bucket. We pulled out the bucket, and under that, to my…
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When They Pry It from My Hip, Ironic Fingers: Exploration & Explosions, a Nevada Desert Hipster Road Trip
NOTE: Some of the activities documented in this photo album, like a lot of what goes on in the Black Rock Desert during the off season (when seven different government agencies aren't there standing by to protect you from yourself), fall firmly in the "Don't try this at home" area. Or even in the "Don't do this at all" area. Seriously. Don't do any of what you see here. You will get yourself killed. We had preparations and precautions which are not described here. And one of us almost got killed anyway.
Back in Spring 2003 I got wind that a bunch of folks I'd met through some fin de siècle attempts to revive the soggy corpse of the SF Cacophony Society were heading out for a road trip through northern Nevada, to do some exploration in the abandoned American Flats silver refinery in the hills outside…
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Vacation Photos: Pseudonymous adventures in Europe pretending to be the Billboard Liberation Front
For a little while I used to run the Billboard Liberation Front's website (INB4: no, don't even bother asking. I have no idea how to reach them anymore. The Old Man is long since retired, and I stopped talking to everyone else I knew through the BLF maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Maybe try contacting them through their site.)
Anyhow, funny story, for maybe 5 or 6 years after I stopped associating with them, I still was getting cc'ed on their website's comment form submissions, which nobody paid any attention to anymore. In late 2007, a request came through from an arts organization in Belgium, asking if the BLF would come give a lecture at a "Culture Jamming" arts festival called "The Game Is Up", thrown annually at the historic Vooruit Art Center in Ghent, that year's theme being "Art For Sale", a…
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Beneath Berkeley: UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels Photojournal—Urban Exploration
Back around 2005-2006, as social media took off, I was a member of an urban exploration chat group, memory fails but it was probably something on Tribe or Friendster. Mentioning my interest in the UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels—a fabled network of sometimes-dangerous underground utility tunnels cross-crossing the UC Berkeley campus, which had once been well-traveled by intrepid explorers but had since been sealed off, with all access supposedly welded shut, although as of this writing I can find no evidence online of this other than an absence of any reported explorations after about 2001, and one or two scattered online claims of later access (which happen to jibe with the experience I'm about to relate)—I was contacted by privately by an old-school liberty-spiked homeless punk kid named Spider, who said he knew a way in.
After a preliminary meeting to…
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Good Day at Black Rock: 27 Photos from Burning Man 1997
Introduction, 2023:
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…
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Beneath the Bay Area: Battery Dynamite — Subterranean Bunker Urban Exploration
somewhere beneath the Bay Area, Aug 6 2004
Last July, my late* trubbamaking companion was trying to find a shortcut down to the beach when he noticed a hole in a fence across the road, where someone had cut it away to allow a tree limb to grow through. Characteristically unable to resist, he climbed through it to explore, and, in a fantastic piece of luck, deep in the woods behind this fence he stumbled onto the surface entrances of what we only later learned was Battery Dynamite, a sprawling underground military facility dating back to World War 2. Several weeks later he brought me there, camera in hand, to explore the corridors of this creepy subterranean relic...
*Repeat visitors to this gallery will notice the change in epithet. In summer 2005, my former intrepid trubbamaking companion was killed in a freak dating accident. Don't mourn for him. He knew…
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Subterranean Serendipity: UC Santa Cruz Porter Caves & the Hell Hole
9/30/2005
I was wandering the trails through the woods by UC Santa Cruz, taking some pictures of trees and stuff and trying to shake off a cold, when fate brought me by sheer happenstance onto this intriguing tableau:
Click any image to enlarge
Hmmm... a bunch of college students out in the middle of the woods... a hole with a ladder into the ground... me coincidentally carrying a camera... what to do... what to do?
The last in line down the hole invited me to follow them and in a moment I was here... this is the Porter Caves, right there on UCSC's campus.
The kids loaned me a spare flashlight, were astoundingly good-natured about the constant firing of my flash, and led me through room after muddy room of this....
While we were down there, one of the guys asked if anyone had been to…
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Back To The Garden: A Visit to Pearl Fryar’s Topiary — photojournal
In August 2018 my mom and I decided to take a road trip from my sister's home in an un-named southern city, where I was crashing for a few months, to visit Pearl Fryar's Topiary Garden, in Bishopville, SC.
Pearl Fryar is a folk artist, famous for, in the 1980s, having cleared a three-acre cornfield next to his home and, with no training and using "throwaway" plants salvaged from a local nursery's discards, created a fantastic topiary garden, incorporating his own whimsical found-object assemblage sculptures in places, which has become a regional tourist attraction of sorts. As late as 2018, he was still maintaining it himself as he rounded the corner into his 80s.
While visiting, we had the good fortune to meet and chat briefly with Mr. Fryar himself, who came out to tend to the grounds while we were there. Nice fellow.…
