President’s Day Weekend, 2009, Dumont Dunes, California: off-road vehicles, ATVs, dune buggies, RVs — the lot, in all their fast-moving ear-splitting glory.
One of my earliest serious desert videos, done with the same shoulder-mounted Sony prosumer 1440i tape camera I did Pumpjack (and several other early videos) with, documenting a tiny bit of the 2009 President’s Day gathering at California’s Dumont Dunes. If you’ve never been to one of these, the video will give you some idea of what they’re about — a generally friendly, well-behaved, and surprisingly well orchestrated and safe endlessly-moving mass of dune buggies, ATVs, off-road bikes, pickups, and RVs I stumbled across accidentally the year before. I’d never really experienced anything like it, and everyone was unfailingly nice to me even with the camera (the Australian accent probably helps), and I enjoyed myself immensely. Oh, and the noise was incredible.
The original soundtrack was Ministry’s Jesus Built My Hot Rod, but I got dinged by YouTube’s copyright thing for that and changed it to the current bland beat. Oh well. Maybe I should put the Ministry version back up one day — it works really well.