Remembering the time it rained 6k pounds of marijuana on Yosemite (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Remembering the time it rained 6k pounds of marijuana on Yosemite (2019)

activenorcal.com

143 pointskyleblarson44 comments

My parents were park rangers at Yosemite when this happened.

They said for the next 5-6 months, the trail clearing crews - who first came across the spilled cargo - were continuously in a verrrry good mood.

My dad was the AV tech around then. Similar stories.

There was also a t-shirt with tail sticking out of the water, with a caption of "I got mine at..."

yeah, there's a picture in the article

rumor has it the ganja hauled out and sold back in Berkley partially financed the startup costs of a number of now large outdoor equipment companies. as well as trips to europe for american climbers to climb in the alps and really step up their knowledge and skills.

Some more background here: Yvonne Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, is one of the "Dirtbags" mentioned in the article - I can't recommend the documentary (the trailer is also in the article) Valley Uprising enough.

I met a gringo in Mexico who told me this long tale of a smuggling plane that had crashed in Yosemite, and how he and other climbers would hike up there to haul weed out, and how this funded many adventures and climbers at the time. He also mentioned that he was good friends with Chouinard. I wasn't completely sure he wasn't making it all up, but the story checks out more and more...

Yeah, sometimes the implausible stories are real. During a high school field trip to MIT, our guide saw a helicopter leaving campus, and he said it was probably his friend who goes to vegas to count cards and makes millions. Sure, I thought, sure.

Then later books and movies came out about it, and the timing checks out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team

Just a nitpick: it's Yvon Chouinard, Yvonne being the feminine version of this first name.

also 'Camp Four'

In John Long's recount (who was a dirtbag) the beginning was even more interesting... apparently someone's girlfriend worked a switchboard and overhead a call about it, mentioned this, and someone else knew the plane type mentioned was a frequent smuggler plane, kicking off the search. Can't remember which book he writes about it in, but it's a great story!

I quite enjoyed this podcast about this time: https://open.spotify.com/episode/69ec4DsblB3utgO1PEkLOh?si=3...

Also can't recommend the documentary Valley Uprising enough.

That site is more cancerous than most, at least on mobile. Popups over popups, brings up the keyboard for some reason, blocks back navigation... I gave up trying to read it.

iOS Reader Mode is a godsend in these situations

Looks fine in mobile safari using the Wipr content blocker, I didn’t see any ads.

Firefox Mobile has "reader mode" button right at the URL box.

Try turning off javascript, maybe using an extension like NoScript.

For more stories of pot in rural areas, I can recommend "Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers"[1]

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Cows-Freaky-When-They-Look/dp/0922820...

This 2005 (claimed to be from Mountain Gazette in the late 70s) repro includes some hiker nostalgia.

http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic%20id=6867...

More discussion: [http://www.whitneyzone.com/wz/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/to...]

in the comments section

> ... Those photos are mine and yet no one contacted me for any information.

I saw the same thing. I was going to upvote this link but changed my mind due to that detail. It's an interesting story, but I don't want to promote a website which uses photos without consent from the author.

Nice read. Reminds me of a similar story about cocaine and the Azores.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/10/blow-up-how-...

John Long wrote a great story about this, which got optioned and eventually became the movie Cliffhanger.

I remember seeing that movie in the 90s, it was terrible. Ripe for MST3K terrible.

(2019)

Added. Thanks!

That title makes no sense whatsoever. In what way did it "rain marijuana"?

It fell from the sky. Also, people were able to pick it up out of a lake after it fell. Those are pretty rain-like attributes, and not often associated with packaged marijuana.

Yes, it happened to be inside a crashing drug-running airplane as it fell, rather than precipitating from a cloud of water vapor, but that's a minor detail.

To be fair, what happened doesn't meet the definition of "rain": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rain

The closest would be: "a heavy fall // a rain of arrows", but even that implies multiple things coming down over an area, not a single plane crashing.

And all the weed was in close proximity to the plane, not like it was being dumped out as the plane flew overhead and spread out over a large area.

It's semantics, but the headline definitely makes you think that a storm is raining down weed when that's not at all what happened.

https://literaryterms.net/literary-device/

Metaphorically. Clever as it came down into Yosemite via a plane falling out of the sky.

Although, yes, it’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek clickbait.

What on earth is this trash website? For a supposedly enlightened community, HN sure seems to happily upvote low quality clickbait headlines that are barely accurate.

I don't know friend, Yosemite climbers in the 1970s were really amazing hackers. They didn't have anywhere near the level of equipment available today but innovated in some key areas. As an example, Yvon Chouinard (one of the Dirtbags referenced in the article) founded Patagonia. One of his biggest innovations was recognizing that some of the equipment his first company manufactured damaged rock, so they invented some new tech, leading to a patent on Hexentrics in 1974.

Here are some references:

- https://patents.google.com/patent/US3948485

- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/patagonias-phi...

Chouinard founded both Black Diamond (called Chouinard equipment at the time) and Patagonia. He sold the hardware business to the employees when he didn’t want to deal with the liability anymore, and they renamed it Black Diamond. He kept Patagonia which was a safer business and grew faster. Patagonia popularized polyester fleece and long underwear among climbers and skiers.

Tom Frost was a Stanford-trained engineer who worked with Chouinard to innovate on ice axes, crampons, pitons, and yes the Hexentric.

Royal Robbins was another big name in early Yosemite climbing and he started the eponymous outdoor clothing company.

The Lowe brothers were well-known climbers in 60s and 70s and invented the internal-frame backpack and the modern padded outdoor camera bags, with their companies Lowe Alpine and Lowepro.

Ray Jardine was an aerospace engineer who invented the spring loaded cam so he could protect the first 5.13 climb in Yosemite. He later invented a lot of the ultralight backpacking gear and techniques that are popular now (tennis shoes, tarps, quilts, etc) which he detailed in a guidebook to the Pacific Crest Trail.

Not all these folks were in on the smuggler plane of course but yeah there was a ton of invention and innovation that came out of early climbing.

This is an excellent reply - thanks for sharing it!

I think my favourite Yvon Chouinard/Tom Frost story is from the dawn of the Hexentrics path of innovation. They came to realize that pitons, which was their cash cow, was damaging rock. So they innovated against themselves and changed climbing!

That's the hacker of my dreams - they're so driven by moving their passion forward that they'll innovate against themselves. :)

Disrupt yourself before someone else disrupts you!

Given your interest, there’s a Tom Frost documentary [1] in progress (I saw an early cut as part of an SFFILM event). There’s a lot of great material, but the film wasn’t ready (late 2019?) and I assume the pandemic paused their release plans.

[1] https://flatlanderfilms.com/about-the-film/

To add one, Doug Philips started Metolious Climbing hacking together the first active protection gear in his garage and selling them in the parking lot at Smith Rock. Bootstraped the company by occasionally building houses, and used metal working machines off-hours at friends shops.

Full story here: https://www.metoliusclimbing.com/metolius-origins.html

Arguably, this comment is incomplete without mention of the "OD" (Original Dirtbag), Fred Beckey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Beckey

this sort of innovation was rife in California in the mid to late 70s (Lucasfilm, Genentech, the Dead). It's one of the things that set up the bay are of today.

The climbing and mountaineering community has always been full of hackers.

On my side of the pond there have been Don Whillans (Whillans harness, Whillans Box tent for Himalayan faces), Hamish McInnes (Terrordactyls - the first drop pick ice axes) and Laurent Grivel (12 point crampon) amongst others.

Maybe the greatest climbing hacker was Andrew Irvine (who disappeared high on Everest in 1924 with George Leigh Mallory). Mallory was the greatest climber of his generation, and over the years there has been questioning on why he took the relatively inexperienced Andrew Irvine with him on a summit bid (rather than say the vastly more experienced Neville Odell). But Irvine was an engineering genius. Every night he was rebuilding the oxygen sets, learning from the experience of the previous day to make them better - to give them the oxygen they needed to survive at that altitude.

Well, it fell from the sky into Yosemite. I feel like it's an appropriate headline, even if it's not literally true.

I don't know, I was disappointed by the title. "Crashed" would have made more sense than "rained". I was waiting for the part where a storm rained the weed all over the valley, but that didn't happen.

More of one big marijuana hailstone.

It's a good story.

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