Sex! Drugs! and Rock’N’Roll!

 

 

Feb 12,1967

The Rolling Stones are one of the most influential bands of all time, the longest standing band in the history of rock’n’roll, and one of the most controversial as well. On this day February 12, 1967, forty-six years ago, the Chichester police of West Sussex, Southeast England, raided Keith Richards mansion during a party, lead guitarist of the Stones, and Mick Jagger, Lead singer, on suspicion of drugs.

At the party were some friends and of Jagger’ and Richards’s including Marianne Faithful, Jagger’s girlfriend at the time and someone whom was considered as the “Acid King” a drug dealer named David Sniderman, accused of tipping off the police. He left London the next day to head back to the US. Faithful was accused of being found in an indecent position with a chocolate Mars Bar.

Just a little bit after eight o clock on the 12^th, there was a loud knock on Richards’s door. Richards opened the door to eighteen police officers holding a warrant to search the premises and the persons in them, under the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1965.

Jagger was accused of illegally possessing four tablets containing amphetamine sulphate and methylamphetamine hydrochloride. Richards was charged with allowing his house to be used for the purpose of smoking cannabis. Both Jagger and Richards pleaded not guilty to the charges and were released on bail to appear in trial later on that year.

Both Jagger and Richards were both released from their sentences do to the fact that their sentences were considered very harsh for first time offences. The appeal to their sentences was marked as void.

Sniderman, after many years, revealed to his family and friends that he was an informant for MI5 and the FBI. The intention was to set up the Rolling Stones on a drug charge in hope to put an early end to their long lasting career.

Sources for the information.

Fun in the Sierras, Fear in the Cascades

Fun in the Sierras, Fear in the Cascades

 

In February of 2012 Sierra Nevada College’s ODAL 201 course took it’s first trip to Desolation Wilderness. Thirteen students were joined together in the wilderness of Tahoe’s Backcountry to go winter camping in the snow.  On this three-day trip we traversed through beautiful terrain with amazing vistas of rugged mountaintops, to ice covered lakes.

 

I remember the second day we were there we learned about several different techniques to be able to survive a harsh winter surrounded by snow.  Throughout the day we talked about how to find shelter, make shelter out of snow a “digloo,” which is essentially a bunch of snow piled into a giant mound, and then dug into to make a version of an igloo.

 

The part of the day that I found to be the most helpful though was when we went over our avalanche safety.  We planed on going for a couple mile hike the next day to one of the peaks in Desolation wilderness, so our instructor thought that it was necessary to learn the basics of avalanche safety.

 

I never thought that I would ever be in any danger during this winter season considering that it rarely snowed. Throughout the entire 2012 winter season it felt like it only snowed about six or seven times, with no snow being able to stick on the ground for longer than a day.

 

Luckily for us on our trip there was plenty of snow out in the backcountry of Desolation Wilderness.

Throughout our lesson of how to be avalanche safe, we learned how long someone has to survive after being buried by an avalanche. Beacons, probes and a shovel came into a great perspective of how necessary those tools are to save someone’s life, after we practiced how to use them.

 

At around the same time that we were in Desolation Wilderness practicing our avalanche safety, two states north in Washington in the Cascade mountains in Tunnel Creek, 16 expert skiers and snowboarders got together to ride the backcountry up there.

 

After recently reading an article out of the New York Times titled Snow Fall, the necessity of being avalanche safe became extremely aware to me. This amazing story tells of these people all of professional background in either skiing or snowboarding, and how tragedy falls upon them after being swept up by an avalanche.

 

Reading this story and seeing how useful the tools are for being safe in the backcountry during the winter, having beacons, probes, and shovels, I felt like I was right there with them almost digging out the victims of the avalanche. I could only imagine how much adrenaline was running through their veins trying to find their friends. We in our ODAL class were only digging to see how much energy is necessary to lift the snow. These brave people were digging to find people who were close to them, their friends.