Night has fallen on the desert, and that’s when we like to tell monster stories. Weird tales.
When there’s trouble on the edge of civilization—where the wilderness meets what mankind makes—well here we encounter fierce things both natural and supernatural.
Subscribe at iTunes or wherever you choose to get your podcasts. Or better yet: Listen live at 10 p.m. on KCDZ 107.7 FM in the High Desert, “from Amboy to Zzyzx,” and across the Great Mojave Wilderness!
Many wonders over the desert skies—both known and unknown—give reason to be out on cool autumn nights, celebrating rituals. Tonight we address the real reason for Halloween (and how you can celebrate it on Nov. 21), tell monster stories around the campfire, and share the glad tidings of Oumuamua, the alien space probe that shot by Earth last year.
EVENT ALERT: Host & DESERT ORACLE editor Ken Layne will be presenting a spooky talk on desert monsters at the Hi-Desert Nature Museum on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 5:30 p.m. This is the Morongo Basin Historical Society’s “Second Wednesday Lecture Series.” $5 donation to MBHS at the door, get there early to get a seat!
Subscribe at iTunes or wherever you choose to get your podcasts. Or better yet: Listen live at 10 p.m. on KCDZ 107.7 FM in Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Pioneertown, Landers, Morongo Valley, Flamingo Heights, Wonder Valley—”from Amboy to Zzyzx,” and across the Great Mojave Wilderness!
We are still digging out from the Great Hi-Desert Deluge of October 2018. In fact, officials at Joshua Tree Town Hall are considering renaming the village “Dirt-Pile City,” in honor of the scenic and massive dirt piles piled alongside every road, as the bulldozers and earth-movers work all day every day to try to patch the hundreds of miles of gullies and ditches and death holes created by the violent storm.
The dirt and sand and grit and boulders and dead animals had previously been located in the mountains surrounding town, but one insane all-night thunderstorm managed to move quite a lot of the stuff in the mountains to the middle on Highway 62 through what we charitably call “Downtown Joshua Tree.”
We tell our own version of the local legend of Private Dirt and Sgt. Sand, and we hear from Phoenix schoolteacher Jenny Russell talking about a graveyard she discovered in South Phoenix—from her appearance at our Valley Bar show in Phoenix put on last summer by Aquarium Drunkard.
Subscribe at iTunes or wherever you choose to get your podcasts. Or better yet: Listen live at 10 p.m. on KCDZ 107.7 FM in Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Pioneertown, Landers, Morongo Valley, Flamingo Heights, Wonder Valley—”from Amboy to Zzyzx,” and across the Great Mojave Wilderness!
What if Crowleyan magick is bad? The Solar Lodge outpost in the California Desert is what we’re talking about. Also: Brendan Maze calling in from Arizona on a bad line. And: A very short desert-noir collaboration via Twitter with John Lurie.
Subscribe at iTunes or wherever you choose to get your podcasts. Or better yet: Listen live at 10 p.m. on KCDZ 107.7 FM in Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Pioneertown, Landers, Morongo Valley, Flamingo Heights, Wonder Valley—”from Amboy to Zzyzx,” and across the Great Mojave Wilderness!
Season 2 premiere, 10 p.m. tonight in the California desert. Listen live on KCDZ 107.7 FM in Joshua Tree and across the Mojave High Desert—from Amboy to Zzyzx and everywhere via podcast. Subscribe at iTunes or wherever you choose to get your podcasts.
And don’t forget: Desert Oracle Campfire Stories with Ken Layne at the Ace Hotel & Swim Club on Halloween Night, starting at 7 p.m, Wednesday October 31 around the campfire.
Tune in this Friday night: KCDZ 107.7 FM in the High Desert. Check your Desert Oracle Radio podcast subscription; new episode will be there Friday evening.
Our final show of the yearlong first season will broadcast tonight at 10 p.m. Joshua Tree Time, across the Mojave Wilderness on Z107.7 FM and everywhere on your podcast device. The desert may be popular with elaborately costumed visitors and weekenders these days, but in time it will go back to the desert of the Bible: a place of banishment and horror, where ostriches and demons dance in the abandoned cabins.
Mysteries of the Great Basin and the Mojave tonight, as we follow the discovery of hundreds of strange ground circles north of Benton on Highway 6 and the bizarre three-clawed tracks of an alleged monster in a nature preserve just outside of the town of Joshua Tree—the latter discovered by Tanene Allison of Joshua Tree. She joins us tonight to discuss these oddball three-clawed footprints that were twice the size of her 70-lb. dog’s paw prints.
And thanks to Patrick Donnelly in Pahrump, we got looped in on a terrific mystery involving bizarre satellite imagery and last-minute scientific field studies.
Recorded live at the Palm Springs Art Museum, it’s Episode #030, here to help you celebrate this Snakesgiving Day Weekend. (We did two episodes at the PS Art Museum; the other will be broadcast next Friday night, May 4. Listen live on the radio, KCDZ 107.7 FM in Joshua Tree, every Friday night at 10 p.m.)
DESERT ORACLE #7 is out now, by the way. Find it all around the High Desert or order a subscription and back issues from our website.
A selection of interesting atmospheric sounds and tracks tonight, including these soundscapes from RedBlueBlackSilver: Highway 247 Hypnosis, Telescope Peak, Amber, Yucca Mesa and Ursa Major. You’ll also hear The Transcendent Tipi by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (Copyright 2016, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial [3.0] license. Ft: Javolenus).
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