Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

This was obviously true at Bass Lake, which had already hosted one Hell’s Angel rally, in 1963, an occasion which resulted in the defiling of a local church. Because of this previous hurt to the community — coupled with a fear of disrupted tourist trade — the law enforcement agencies of Madera County decided to fight the Hell’s Angels with a new kind of stratagem. The dis­trict attorney, Everett L. Coffee, drew up a document — a legal restraining order designed to keep the outlaws out of Madera County forever. Or at least that was the general idea.

Sometime around noon it became apparent from the multitude of radio alarms that several large bands of Hell’s Angels were indeed headed for Bass Lake. Yet there were other reports of communities in both northern and southern California still braced for invasion. This was because various elements of the press had managed to convince each other that there were actu­ally five hundred to a thousand Hell’s Angels — so when only two hundred showed up at Bass Lake both the news media and the police felt certain the others would strike somewhere else. When a half dozen of the Frisco Angels appeared in Marin County they were immediately surrounded and followed by sheriff’s deputies who knew they were only the vanguard of a whole army just over the rise. The sad truth was that Frenchy and a few of his Box Shop cohorts had canceled out on the main run, wanting to avoid trouble, and had decided to go off on their own for a peaceful weekend. As it turned out, they were harassed more severely than they would have been at Bass Lake.

If the Angels needed evidence to support their strength-in-numbers policy, they got it on July Fourth. The only outlaws who didn’t get jerked around by the law were those who made the rally. The few splinter groups who went off by themselves were searched and ticketed from one end of the state to the other. Afterward, a careful count of Hell’s Angels sightings added up to less than three hundred, including all the rest of the clubs. Where the other seven hundred outlaws spent the holiday is any man’s guess; if Mr. Lynch knew, he wasn’t talking.*

* Mr. Lynch has consistently refused to talk about the Hell’s Angels. The subject seems to embarrass him. As Attorney General of the nation’s most populous state, he is living testimony to the theory that silence is wisdom. Governor Brown is his good friend and benefactor.

Somewhere near Modesto, about halfway between Oakland and Bass Lake, I heard on the radio that roadblocks were being set up to prevent the outlaws from entering the resort area. At the time I was running slightly ahead of the Joker-Angel convoy but behind the main Angel contingent that had left the El Adobe before I arrived. I wanted to be on hand when they got to Bass Lake, for the newscasts left no doubt that a major riot was inevitable.

There are two ways to get to Bass Lake from the freeway U.S. 99. I knew the Angels would go south to Madera and then take California 41, a wide, well-paved highway, all the way into Yosemite. The other access route is about fifty miles shorter, but it is a maze of switch-offs and half-paved backroads through the mountains. It took off at Merced and climbed up to Tuttle, Planada, Mariposa and Bootjack. According to the map, the last twenty miles appeared to be a gravel goat track. My car had been wheezing and shimmying all the way from San Francisco, but I swung left at Merced and floored it for a long roller-coaster-run through the foothills. Only two of the outlaws, both strays, made the mistake of taking the same route. I passed one; he was kneeling over a road map in an ancient gas station near Mormon Bar. The other, with a girl on the back, came wailing past me on the climb to Mariposa. The temperature at noon was 105 degrees, and the brown California hills looked ready to burst into flame at any moment. The only green in the landscape was the fringe of scrub oaks looking down on the valley. People who claim to know say these knotty little trees exist in only two places — California and Jerusalem. In any case, they burn well, and if a fire gets started in the grass below, the main job of the stand-by fire crews is to keep it from reaching the oaks which squat there in the dry wind like an army of nervous virgins, a firestorm waiting for a spark.