Slow Baja - Author And Historian David Kier Reflects On Fifty Years Of Baja Travel

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

David Kier is a humble historian who has been traveling to Baja since the early '60s. With a copy of Gerhard and Gulick's Lower California Guide Book -known as the "Baja Bible," he sat between his parents on the bench seat of the Jeep Wagoneer as their trusted navigator. He read the map, followed the odometer, the "bible," and kept his father abreast of what to expect on the road ahead. On his first trip, they drove to the fishing village of San Felipe and South to Puertecitos. The goal was Gonzaga Bay, but that was fifty miles further over the toughest road in Baja. When the locals said the road was impassable, his father thought of the fish he was going to catch, dropped the Wagoneer into 4Lo, and five hours later, they arrived. Kier continued making Baja trips with his parents, including an epic tour of 800+ miles on dirt down to the tip in 1966. The journey was so dusty and difficult that they took the ferry to Mazatlan to drive paved roads home. In 1973, he turned 16 -to celebrate, he and a buddy took his Myers Manx to Baja. It would be his first of many trips to come. There were two more firsts that year; he went to the Baja 1000, where Bill Sanders and Pete Springer won in a Land Cruiser FJ40, and he published his first book titled Baja and the Transpeninsular Highway. In this conversation, Kier shares stories of those early travels and subsequent trips for The Old Missions of Baja and Alta California 1697-1834 his book with Kurillo and Tuttle. And his latest book Baja California -Land Of Missions. Visit David Kier's website here Follow on Instagram Follow on Facebook

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down, my favorite tequila. Slow Baja is brought to you by the Baja XL rally. The Baja XL is the largest and longest amateur off-road rally on the Baja Peninsula. It's 10 epic days. LA to Cabo back to LA, mostly on dirt.

For an adventure of a lifetime, you got to check out the Baja XL rally. More information at BajaXL.org and on Facebook at the Baja XL Rally News and Support Group. It's coming up January 2021. Be there. Hey, this is Michael Emery, the Slow Baja podcast, and I'm in Fallbrook, California with David Kier today, and we are talking about the peninsula of. happiness. So you've been going to Baja since you were a kid. You were just starting to tell me before I turned the recorder on about how your dad is a dentist and a fisherman and average fisherman and had a

customer or client who said, you know, you need to start going to Baja and you need to fish in Baja. And your dad said, nah, you know, I can't go down there in a Jeep. I've got wife and kids. And all of a sudden he's got a wagoneer. It's a little bit of a plush off rotor. And you were on your way. You were sitting between mom and dad logging the mileage and telling your, you're telling your dad where to go. That's pretty much it. They made me the navigator and with a copy of the lower California guidebook by Gerhard and Gulick, which was known as the Baja Bible back in the day. And I would tell them what was coming up ahead on the road and which way to turn if necessary. And that's how the memory of Baja, even though I was just a young kid, was etched into my mind because I did all

that recording and visual reconnoiting of the land compared to what the book said. And so I have a great memory of Baja, California travel before the highway was paved in the 1960s. And I've carried that through today to keep that memory of the old glory days of Baja alive for the new people that have no concept of what it was like, what it was like to take two weeks to drive to La Paz compared to two days. Right. So what was your first trip south with your parents?

The first trip we took was to Gonzaga Bay. We went south from San Felipe, and when we stopped at Puerto Citos, which is a little fishing camp, a gringo bar, if you will, the people there said, oh, the road ends here. You can't go any further. And my dad said nuts to that, and we put it in four-wheel drive, and we made it to Gonzaga Bay, and about five hours later, and that was wonderful. So did he have any experience off-roading here in San Diego area? Did he get into the desert and just say, I'm going to learn how to do this? Or did he just a man of adventure and said, you know what, I've got the right tool? I'm bringing my wife and kids, and we're going to figure it as we go.

That was pretty much it. He was not afraid of anything, and we learned how to use four-wheel drive pretty quick from that trip on. And going to Gonzaga Bay back in the 60s, that was considered the toughest road in Baja at the time, because it was low range crawling up and down very steep grades. And you learn or you die, basically. Wow. All right. And how did your mom take it? She was great. She got right into it, right off the bat, and she has a fascination with history. When we would see old graves or in later trips, mission sites, she was right there and just absorbed by the history.

And I guess that's what rubbed off to me, on to me. My father with the four-wheel driving and the fishing and my mom with the historical interest. So obviously that That apple didn't fall far from the tree Exactly So how did it progress From your first trip fishing in Gonzaga Bay And then on to I know just from following you on social media That you were into some of the earlier Baja races

Exactly Early 70s Sure, as soon as I turned 16 We had a street legal Myers-Manks Dunebuggy Was my first car to take to high school So it was a Baja vehicle And that was I like your dad already.

Yeah, that's how we began. As soon as I turned 16, my parents knew, I knew enough Spanish, and I was a responsible kid, that they could trust me, so they signed the permission slip as you need to have until you're 18 to go to Baja. So a friend and I did our first Baja trip when I was 16, and that was in 74. And then Baja off-road racing was interesting to me. My dad and I actually went to the first Baja 1,000 because it had been the Nora Mexican 1,000, up until 1973, when the Mexican government decided they're going to switch things up and run the race themselves, which they did for one year. And I was at that race, the 73,000. And I loved off-road racing because it combined the beauty and wonders of Baja with the off-roading and both four-wheel drive and two-wheel drive driving over those roads.

And in 1974, my mom and I went down to Mike Sky Ranch for the first score race, which is called the Baja Internacional, also known as the Baja 500, but they couldn't legally call it the 500 for a few years because Nora held onto that name. And I went to all the score races pretty much after that. And at one of the races, someone was at a pit nearby and said, would you have to hold a fire extinguisher for us? I said, sure. So I became a helper at a pit for a group called Los Campione's. It's a racing team that was out of Vista, California. And that's how I got connected. And after a few years, that was a pit captain at several races.

And I got invited to be a co-driver in the 1979 Baja 1000. Wow. So that was great. Wow. So as a co-driver, you're in the navigator's seat reading the root book and trying not to get sick, I'm assuming. It's got to be like crazy. I did get sick, but it wasn't from the racing. It was from way too much Negro Medello the night before.

Okay, well, that's a hazard of racing in Mexico. I'm well aware of those hazards. Pre-race celebration. We didn't get very far. The differential blew up on us, leaving Ensenada, going up towards Ojos Negroes. But I had a month earlier pre-run the race course, which was going to be my portion, which was San Matea's Pass through Gonzaga Bay to El Crucerro. So I just done that, and I did in my Subaru forward drive wagon, which I had in 79.

Wow. And the road was really, really bad shape south of Portisitos. My exhaust system is still there somewhere in the rocks. Sure it is. And so I came home in a very noisy Subaru wagon. Yeah. Wow. So from those days in the 70s and heading down there as a youngster in high school, which is just great that, you know, parents were not helicopter parents in those days.

They gave you something super dangerous like a Myers-Manks. and then say, hey, take that down to Mexico. I love it. Obviously, the bond was formed early, and what kept you coming back? Needing to see more, what was over that hill, what was in that canyon. It was much like what Earl Stanley Gardner claimed what drew him to Baja to wonder what's behind what he could see, because the road down through Baja was, you know, one spot, but there was mountains and canyons, and who knows what lay behind those hidden passageways. So I was the same way.

I wanted to see where those dirt roads went to and also to kind of re-record as things changed. So I started documenting the areas I went to by drawing maps of them. And I got real interested in drawing maps. And I actually inspired to be a cartographer when I grew up more. But from the time I was a kid, I was drawing maps of places we went camping to. Amazing. So do you want to hit a few highlights for me?

Tell me about some of the places if you were going to jump. your Toyota truck today and throw some camping gear in and head to Baja as if it were open and you could do that legally. We're talking in the times of corona. We're still under shelter in place, although being in San Diego doesn't feel like people are sheltering much anymore. They're at the beach yesterday and I ate in a restaurant, you know. We did too. The first time, I ate two months. It's just terrific.

It felt so great to just order chips and guacamole and sit in a restaurant with people. It was wonderful. Yeah, I was missing some. some sushi, so I had that yesterday and street tacos. So where would you go? If you were going to jump in your truck now. Our first choice, and we would have gone this past weekend, if it hadn't been for what's going on with the COVID-19 coronavirus, it would be to what I call Shell Island.

Okay. And it's a beautiful sand beach. It's a barrier island that is separated from the rest of Baja by a long, narrow lagoon and a deep mud field, unless the tide's really high, and it actually is an island surrounded by water. And this is about 20 miles south of San Felipe, and there's nothing else there because you can't develop a place that's in the tidal zone of Mexico. So it's a great place to dry camp, to be in the sand dunes and not need any facilities whatsoever. So that's our number one choice for camping. It's only five or six hours away from where I live, and we can just be on our own,

quiet, the birds just going by, the oceans going in and out with the tides. It's wonderful. Wow, sounds lovely. Sounds lovely. I like that area between San Felipe and Puerto Citos, and Ted and I spent a little bit of time driving, I guess we were driving north on the east side after the Baja XL rally in January of 19, and we came all the way up the East Peninsula. I saw those photos, yes. It's an area that really speaks to me, and I really would like to get back and spend more time poking around there. One of the towns that's always fascinated me, and I love to get your. take on it before we get on to the missions.

Santa Rosalia. Tell me about what do you know about Santa Rosalia and broken down factories that are right there on the main road out and it just fascinates me. There's two Santa Rosalia and we were introduced to the

first one in 1966 on our trip down to the tip of Baja which was our great adventure in our Jeep wagoneer. And then it was a very sad looking dirty dusty mining town it had no appeal whatsoever and the thing to do was get gasoline if you could and get out of there as quickly as you can the way my parents would describe it

all right because it is a mining it was a copper mining town right and it just wasn't very appealing now of course in years since then it's been you know cleaned up if you will made into quite a neat destination. The church designed by Gustav Eiffel is an attraction there, the Black Sand Beach, the bakery, you know, so it has its charm for sure, and a couple nice hotels are just south of town. So, yeah, it's totally changed from the way I first saw Santa Rosalia to the way it is today. I first saw it in 1986, heading to Mulei, I guess, and reading about it in a guidebook and just saying, this is a place you've got to get the bread, which the bread was already sold out, of we got some pastries or whatever when we were there.

And it was interesting, and it's always just sort of stuck in my head, you know, those decrepit big factories right on this main drag there, right on the highway, just made me think if this was anywhere else, those would already be turned into some sort of boutique hotel or something. You know, they're right across from the water with, you know, great views. It's special because it's not a – it's in Mexico, but it's not a Mexican town. It's a French town. Exactly. Now there's newer infrastructure that's Mexican-oriented, but –

Boy, you know, from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, that's all French-style construction and building in there. Yeah, built out of wood that was shipped from wherever, you know, up the coast of California, I'd assume. Okay, so your great family adventure. Let's jump on that because that, again, I wish my dad had been that adventurous. The trip to the tip you're talking about? Yeah, the trip to the tip. So after a year of going to, we went to Gonzaga Bay a couple times and went south of San Felipe. for surf fishing to, it was called Agua de Chale in those days,

but the fellow who had developed a camp there named Louise renamed it Nuevo Massadlan because they wanted to sound more touristy. And so that's where we'd camp and we'd go surf fishing near there. And after a few of those trips, we started wanting to see more of Baja. I said, well, the big deal is to, you know, to drive to Cabo San Lucas and then go to La Paz and take the ferry across because after, 800 miles of dirt roads you wanted some pavement to come back home on so we did that i think it was at least two weeks of the trip and i remember much of it driving down highway one the pavement ended before

you got to colonnette so about 80 some miles below in sonata the pavement just ended and my dad said okay now the adventure begins and and it was a you know pretty washboardy graded road until you get to the sand canteen area then started to degrade down to more of a a natural dirt road and And a steep drop off into El Rosaria was pretty wild because it was a very steep canyon. And you had to stop and listen before you drove down it to make sure no cars were coming up because there's no place to pass for that two miles or so going down. Yeah. So you're using your senses there that people don't use anymore.

So you'd listen to see if somebody was chugging their way up and look for dust trails or what have you. Bad roads, good people, Mama Espinoza. So you must have actually met her when she was running her. That trip I don't remember her or that we stopped there necessarily. There were two gas sources there. One is where the Baja Cactus is now, the Pamex Station, and then the pump in front of Mama Espinosas. So I'm not sure where we topped off there. I'm sure we must have.

But it was after the highway was paved in 1973 that Mama Espinoza coined that phrase that everyone's very famous or knowledgeable about bad roads bring good people and good roads bring all kinds of people. Okay. So, yeah, so I just remember that, you know, we'd gone out and we camped at different spots along the way, like Agua Dulce, a famous spring on the El Camuner Real, and the old main road went right by it, and we actually camped the night there. And I've been back there a few times since then to kind of remember, oh, yeah, we camped here,

and there's a ranch on a site now, but it's a big waterhole and the only good water supply for many miles to the missionaries and the Indians and all the travelers coming up through Baja, The gold mine, the 49ers, came up through Baja as well. And was your dad much of a photographer? No. You didn't have the, you don't have a... He always managed to cut our heads off or got the left or right side of us. It wasn't the greatest photographer, sorry.

So you don't have a box of coat of crumbs of those early trips? Well, I do because, you know, my mom took some, I might have taken some. So I've got a few old pictures that, yeah, so some memories. And how was your Spanish in those days? Did you have enough to get by? I don't think there was very much at all. And it was either hand motions or there's enough English known that, and there wasn't a lot of human interaction back in those days.

Sure. You'd stop. They might want to stop like at, I remember Ranch of San Augustine, was famous for having a kerosene refrigerator, so they had cold beer. And, you know, things like that. So you go in and you gave them a peso or whatever, and they'd give you the soda or the beer. And then you know very much.

Spanish in those days. And highlights of that trip, I mean, tell me what it must have been like for you to see the first mission or see that first oasis or, you know, what was it that sticks out? Yeah, the one oasis that really seemed to be phenomenal to me was Comandu, because that was on the old main road to La Paz. It did go through Loretto. So south of the Bahia Concepcion, the road went inland and through San Jose and San Miguel de Comandu.

and that was just beautiful because it's all lava maces and desert and then you drop down in this beautiful Palm Canyon, much the way you experience coming into San Ignacio, the same kind of beauty. And there was a little activity going along the side of the road in Komandu, and they were having a little fiesta. They invited us to stop and stay, so we got out, and they were cooking a turtle.

Wow. Making a turtle stew, and they had the turtle shell that they're actually cooking in with a chopped up meat and adding vegetables, and they invite us to stay, and my parents kind of politely declined. It was too exotic, I guess, for them. So I don't know if we'd ever had a chance to eat turtle back when it was legal and okay to eat turtle.

Sure. Yeah, well, times change. Yep. It's supposed to be very tasty, but, yeah, times do change. And on that note, turtles, turtle rescue has always been fascinating to me ever since I first saw Jacques Cousteau on TV saying, like, baby turtles returning to Z, Z, the cycle of life continues. Have you spent any time?

There used to be a turtle rescue place. Was it Bia de Los Angeles? Yes, it was. Antonio, a fellow that ran that. He had passed away in recent years. His wife, Betty, maintains their camp there by the old turtle rescue facility.

And I've got a great photograph of Antonio handing my, well, she's my girlfriend at the time, but my wife now, a baby turtle. So I got a picture of her holding the baby turtle of his flippers flapping. Is that right? And it was cute.

So that's all gone now. But the turtle rescue tanks were, we always would visit that back in the early 2000s. And it was Bahia de Los Angeles that was there, yeah. Just north of town is what his place was. And the turtle habitat, I'm sorry to pin you down on turtles, so I don't know. We got off the subject here. But I always consider Toto Santos in that area to be more rich with turtle life. Is there turtle life on the Cia Cortez and, I mean, or, or, you know,

turtles up there, do you know? Sorry. Feel free to say no, we'll cut this part out. No, no, that's okay. Turtle fishing and hunting, if you will, at the time, was pretty active all the way up to Bayas, San Luis Gonzaga. It was turtles were harvested by fishermen. And L.A. Bay was a big turtle source.

And turtle trucks would bring the turtles from there to Ensenada on regular weekly drives over the dirt roads of the day. And matter of fact, one of the off-road racers, I think it was actually Steve McQueen because all the Hollywood actors would love to go off-road racing back in the old Baja race days. He actually, when he broke down, I'm going to correct if it was Steve McQueen or...

Anyway, would actually have to ride on back of some turtles and a turtle truck to get back to where he could get a normal ride back to Ensenada. Wow, that's a story I'm going to have to find the details on. Right. It was either Steve McQueen or one of the other actors who loved to go racing in Baja. I've seen James Garner. car and I think that's just interesting

to think that those racers, those actors in those days also took up Baja racing when it was just sort of a macho thing you get out. It was great. Well, in matter of fact, when Bill Strapp teased Parnelli Jones that he wasn't mad enough to race Baja, the race

off road, because he had no interest in sort of the kids dirt road race and boy, that got Parnelli all worked up and look what's happened with him in off-road racing. He's one of the founding fathers. Yeah, Pete Brock, he got off deep into Baja racing as well.

Just loved it from, you know, his sports car days and working with Carol Shelby. And, you know, recently, I don't know if he had a prominent role in Ford versus Farrar, but he was one of those guys making cars that went to La Maw. And then, you know, just got off deep in Baja and found it was like the most challenging thing you could do in a race car. Baja has a way of, I don't know, infecting you with the, what I call a Baja bug. because once it gets into your system, you can't shake it. You just have to go back again and again. That's the only treatment.

There's no cure for Baja fever. So tell me, we're looking at a stack of books here, and the first one appears to me like it could have been done by David Kier when he was in middle school or in high school. It looks like a report on Baja. I was 15 years old. And the Trans-Peninsula Highway. 15 years old, so one more time you told me,

when we first arrived when you were born, but tell our listeners, 15 years old, this would have been 1960. Well, this was the summer of 1973. The Baja Highway was under construction, and we had heard it was almost... It was a big deal. Yeah, it was a huge deal because, you know,

years and years of dirt roads, and we had heard that it was nearly finished. My dad actually sold his last four-wheel drive and bought a Ford station wagon, and he decided he would, modify it and have air shocks added and an extra gas tank because there'd be great distances between gasoline sources. But we made that for the trip to go to Loretto and do some fishing out of Loretto. Well, as it turned out, the highway was still a long ways from being completed.

There was a good couple hundred miles of dirt road still. And we got to the end of the pavement about 40 miles from El Rosario, and boy, that was kind of a neat adventure. Well, I recorded all the mileages of detour, construction, and then the old section of the old original dirt road that we'd driven on in 66 and recorded all those notes and mileages and decided I would self-publish a little booklet so anyone that needed the latest information on the highway before it was completed could have that reference. And boy, I couldn't believe how well it's sold out. my brother-in-law was a bank, worked at a bank, and he had access to a copy machine. My sister typed it up, and I made these, I got these old yellow-jacketed covers, and hand-wrote the title of it, Baja on the Transponinsular Highway. And I sold every one I could put together.

I finally got tired of making them. And the highway was finished, and they were still selling. I had a little update notes added to the later editions of it. And it was on TV. Channel 8 in San Diego had a morning show called Sunup. and it was shown on that show. I was in school, so I couldn't see it. But it's like some good publicity on newspaper article wrote about it.

And where would people find it? Was it mail order from you? Well, not in those days. Word of mouth? It could have been word of mouth, but it had it in two bookstores in Escondito. Well, that's terrific. On consignment. And they happily sold them.

I just made them up after school and took them to the bookstore. A glimpse into the mind of David Kier. You're still working on those sort of ideas, right? You're still saying, I need to do a book on this, and you were doing hand-drawn maps back then when you were in high school, and you're still interested in cartography. Tell me about your book on the missions. Okay, so the book on the missions. Read us the title, and I'll post it all in the show notes. Certainly.

It's Baja, California, Land of Missions. It was published in 2016, and it's now in its eighth printing. Wow. Awesome. The book continues to sell. It's popular. I did a great job on it if I do say so myself. And the purpose of it was my interest in details and accuracy lent itself to have me, you know, do something that was available to the masses, if you will, the Baja interests people, that provided the true and correct information on the missions, plus a lot of details that aren't out in any books yet, except for mine.

the latest discoveries and findings of what the Padres wrote and what was done down in Baja. So I wanted to correct errors made by earlier books and make it in a very user-friendly, easy-to-read format that gave a brief history of each mission and, you know, how it was that Baja California became Baja California because it was actually California first. Baja is where California began and through the name changes and the acquisition of Upper California by the United States, Baja California, lost its original name, and now it's Baja California instead of just California. Right.

So I explain that in the book. And how did you travel to do your research? I'm assuming you've been to these missions. You've been to the remaining missions. Well, you know, even the ruins of the mission. Right. Right. I've been to every mission except one.

and the one mission that I hadn't been to requires like two days of horseback riding to get to. And that's up in the mountains of Baja, San Pedro Martyr. When are we going? Exactly, we should do it. But my publishing partner, who's Max Carrillo, is very well known. He's been on Huell Hauser's TV show a couple times. He had been there and wrote a quite a detailed article about it. So between him and friends of mine that actually gone there and photographed it,

I could honestly say I had plenty of information include that. So I've all 27 missions, and I've been to all of them except that one mission personally. Wow. And driving to them camping, or you buy mule, by horse? How did you get to most of these? No, I'm easy going. I'm a car camper. All my stuff comes out of the back of my Tacoma truck now.

And so I tent camp or just camping a cot under the stars, and that's how I do it. And either camp. And once in a while we stay at a motel, you know, a fresh enough. up and there's great motels in Baja, like El Rosario has Baja cactus, and San Ignacio has a La Werta and, you know, nice places. And tell me about, remind me of the owner of Antonio, Antonio. Antonio Munoz. Yeah. Antonio, I can see his face.

I can see the picture of Antonio and Ted Nye standing in front of the fire trucks that I took a year ago, and I just was blanking on his name. He's a wonderful human being. Yeah, does his angel work, which is just, you know, amazing bringing the, uh, the firefighting equipment and the first responder equipment, the emergency vehicles, that's the word I'm looking for, the emergency vehicles down to help motorists who have been in accidents. And it just shows me like what one person can do. He knew there was a need because of a great void between El Rosario and almost Aguero Negro.

Yeah, that's nearly 200 miles of really nothing to help anyone that needed it. And so he's getting a, he has a radio network now with ham repeaters, I guess. and it's just, you know, to make sure that people get help. Yeah, as we were talking about the fellow who had the turtle farm previously, you know, helping the turtles. Right. Again, one person can make a difference, especially in a place like Baja. One person really can, you know, get some things done.

Exactly. So tell me more. So, um. Old missions. Yeah, well, the old missions book, before, before my book on just the Baja missions, Max Carrillo and I did a book on all. the missions of both Californias in the correct order they were founded, not based on a line that didn't exist, because you can see books about the upper or Alta California missions, and there's

now books about the Baja California missions, but there was no line separating them. They were all California missions. Loretta was the first mission, not San Diego, so we wanted a book that represented the actual true founding order of the missions. And that's what the old missions of Baja and Alta California did. And that was in 2012. Then I decided to have a detailed book on just the Baja missions, which was greatly needed, as I mentioned earlier. And this year, we've done a new edition of that old missions book, changed the title name slightly, and readressed it because it was a very popular book with some brief history of each mission, photographs.

And my latest project, I guess it's my latest project, which hopefully will get published this year, but the COVID-19 situation is kind of delayed a lot of things, is with Baja bound Mexican auto insurance, doing a new guidebook with them and a series of maps. And so it's the Baja Bound Road Guide, and the title might change. But I have gone through Baja in 2017 and 2018. So many of the popular roads and noting all of the kilometer markers, which are great reference points to find turnoffs and stuff on the highways,

and where there are no kilometer markers, then the odometer mileage readings, like in the good old days. And GPS mapping and so forth, and what I'm showing you right now is a rough pre-publication version of it. It's going to look really nice. There's a fellow back on East Coast that is putting it together in a professional book format. So hopefully Baja Bound will be able to get back on its feet

after the slowdown business and get this. and get this thing published so people can have a new guidebook to Baja, and I'm happy to be a part of that. That's great. That's great. You know, my Baja adventure buddy, Ted Donovan, he and I had so much fun in my old land cruiser on the Baja XL, just using the Baja almanac, just saying,

we're just going to do this with paper maps, and everybody's got GPS and sophisticated stuff. Now, it's awesome to have something that's... Yeah, something that's tangible. It's in your hands, were dating ourselves or something, but it is, I think, really valuable, especially in a place like Baja, you know, if you don't have access to the internet or the cell reception or whatever, you can take a look in the old book.

It's sad. It's sad that, like the automobile club, we had a great Baja folding maps. Very handy, and they stopped printing those back in 2010. So it's like, you know, the folding map or a map book is just a wonderful thing to have and look at it. I mean, you don't have to have any cell phone reception. You don't have to have any electricity. It's a map on paper.

It's like, birth. Yeah, and I think there is something to that tangible that you can hold in their hand. I just bought a couple of those AAA maps off of eBay, actually. They were on and nobody was bidding on them. And I thought, you know, I really loved those. And I'm sure my dad still has a few of them. If I was scrounging around in his garage, I could find them. But I didn't have any of them.

And, you know, to have a pair of those, I have one with me on this trip. It's really a great thing. You can lay it out on your kitchen table, and you can see the whole, you know, the whole peninsula there. I think it's a beautifully done map. The frame thinks better by looking at it rather than flash pages on the electronic screen. I just think it records better. I'm with you on that. When's your next trip?

Where are you going? When are you going? Well, we had actually two TV, we had one TV show trip planned for this year, and that got canceled. So whenever we can reschedule it, we're going to do a four-wheel drive. trip to Mission Santa Maria for an Amazon TV show called In Forlo. And if that still goes on, we'll be having an episode of that. And I'm always available to Cameron Steele for his trail emissions. I've done a lot of work with Cameron in helping him design some of his trips,

some information sheets for his guests. And I was with Cameron and his crew on the Trail Emissions Recon of 2019. That was fantastic. We were together for six days. And to have someone like Kurt Leduc be your driver and a hundred plus mile an hour Ford Raptor on those dirt roads was pretty exciting for me. And so, yeah, you can see those on YouTube or the recon trips.

I'll have to take a look at those. Yeah. Kurt Ladook's a guy that I just got to know a little bit through the last Nora race. And I'll be seeing him hopefully in October for the Mexican 1000. I look forward to spending some time having him shepherd, Ted and I. in our old truck. Kurt's a really great human being. I really enjoyed.

I really got to know him. He just, I think, he's a little down-to-earth person, a lot of fun. Yeah, I think I just need to jump into his pasture so you can say, hey, Kurt, take me for a scare. Do what you tell him, tell him, do what you did to David Kear. David Kear sent me. Take me for a good scare, Kurt.

Yeah. Yeah, all right. Well, we're rolling up here on just over a half hour. I won't take up too much of your time. And I really want to say thanks for making open your home and making some time to talk about our mutual passion. Before we wrap up, though, David, I'd really like to say, so lucky that your dad was an adventurer and took you to Baja in the early 60s, and you've been at it now for, we're talking

about 50 years here, you've been going to Baja. Right. What has changed and what has stayed the same for you? Well, what stays the same is pretty easy, because that's why I still go back for, is the nature, natural situation that you find when you go to beaches and canyons and desert, when you can just be one with the land, one with the ocean, and that's never going to change as long as you can get to those places away from the paved roads, away from the people, masses of people. Sure, have friends along, have family along. And then you also have,

the other great thing about Baja that hasn't changed are the people that live in the ranchos or the fish camps because once you're one-on-one knowing those people, they make you part of their family. They share everything they have with you if you need something like you've broken down or whatever. They do anything to help you out even if it impoverishes them further and they're just an amazing people. So that hasn't changed. So those are the good things about Baja, the land and the people of Baja. You know, what has changed that we don't like as much are fences. There's way too many fences now in Baja and they're way too much. to me lock gates. There's a couple of missions now that are places that are locked off.

One's a beautiful rock art site, and another is one of the missions has got a gate now in front of it that you can't get to easily. So it's, you know, those things happen. There's crime in certain places, but I avoid cities. Baja, I love the cities of La Paz and Loretto, Insenada, but, you know, I'd rather be out in the country. I'd rather camp under the stars. So Baja, I think, will always be that to me. And are the stars really better and the stars really brighter and the tacos better in Baja? Twice. Twice as better. Twice as brighter. Twice as good. I'm quoting Joy Lewis who said that in a recent podcast. The stars are brighter and the tacos are better in Baja. So Joy, that's a shout out to you. But I think you're right. And you say it's, she's right. Twice as good. At least. Yeah. And wrapping up here,

you had mentioned San Pedro de Matier. Have you spent much time up in that country? I've been up to the observatory several times. The first was in 1972, and the last time was when I was working on the new guidebook in 2017. And it's very cold up there even a summer for camping. Yeah, no, it's very much pine force. It looks like you could be in Alta, California, you know, in some northern part of logging country or something. It really is really very different than the rest of Baja. It is.

It's an island, if you will. It's an unique location. And Graham McIntosh wrote about it very well in his book near My Dog to Thee. And it's just it is. It's a Baja Sky Island, I think is how he termed it. And it is definitely special. And we see condors flying overhead. You can't get over there.

That's something else. That's got to be something that's just amazing. Yeah, I've driven up there, but I haven't seen the, I haven't had the glory of seeing the condors. In closing, what would you tell somebody who's taking their first trip to Baja? I would say have an itinerary of things you'd like to see a list, but don't need to stick to it. Don't think you have to go by that and stay there a certain number of days. Be open to changes, stay longer if you want to, leave a place if you don't care for it, but do not stick to your itinerary, just have a plan of ideas you want to go to.

But be open-minded and just enjoy it because everything always works out when you go on to a Baja trip. Even if you have problems, everything works out, and it makes a great story at the campfire. on a future trip. And where are you starting? Where are your resources when you're doing your online research? Where would you send somebody straight away? Like you're going to go to the internet

and you're going to go to... Oh, go to my website, vivabaha.com. All right. Now we're talking. We're getting the plug-in. That's important part. And I'll have that in the show notes, of course. But vivabaha.com.

Yeah, I've got many, many links to other people's websites that have interesting articles, links to my trip, my trips from the past. So you can see photos of places. So you can get an idea if you'd like to go to where I like to and Baja, and lots of maps. I've got great new map center from past and present with zoomable features. So I love maps, so as many maps as I could get on it, I thought would be of use.

Plus, the great old maps in the Lower California Guidebook. So it's a flashback to the 1960s before the highway was paved. Right, and you're findable. I mean, I've found you. You're on the Internet. People can find you easily, and you're accessible. That's what I'm trying to say. You're accessible, and you've been very kind to me and pointed out a couple of recent things on my Facebook.

link that didn't work and a mistake that I had on a mission. So people can find you via Facebook on what groups primarily. I actually have a Facebook group page. Okay. It's a Facebook.com slash old missions is my main page. But the group page on that site is where you can join our group and really discuss the missions and see lots of photos. And that's all on, you can get the links on vivabaha.com. All right. They're all linked on the front page of that. And I think I found you in the Baja visitor group that Ted's active. Yeah, and Ted likes it. He posts some of my photos there, and we exchanged a lot of information.

I've known Ted for a lot of years. You're wearing a shirt right now, the Baja Talk Radio. I've got to look at the Baja talk radio shirt on, so that stands out. You didn't need the last two that on those shirts, you know, before podcast. That was a pretty gutsy thing to go out and do live Internet talk radio. Pioneering Baja talk, yeah. I enjoyed it. All right, well, David, I appreciate you making some time for me and Slow Baja and talking to us about your passion, the missions and traveling in Baja.

So thank you very much. My pleasure. Look forward to seeing you in Baja soon. I hope to be there soon. All right, cheers. Hey, you guys know what to do. Please help us by subscribing, sharing, rating, all that stuff. And if you missed anything, you can find the links in the show notes at Slowbaha.com.

I'll be back before you know it. And if you want to receive notices on new episodes, please follow Slow Baja on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for you old folks.