Deeper into the Canyon

 Deeper Into the Canyon

<previous, into The Lost Canyon

Pete was a wildly eccentric, some would say “mad” genius. Dion Wright came as close as one could come with his description, “Divine madness”. 

The Lost Canyon Trip is as much a study of Pete’s inner world as it is a study of  the hills. The show took unbelievable amounts of dedication and years of hard work to create.

 “The Lost Canyon Trip” show consisted of over a dozen carousels of 35mm slides of Pete’s paintings, several large spools of reel-to-reel tape recordings, plus Hi-Fi speakers, Pete’s home-made “Arc-A-Vision” screen, and his “Smell-a-Rama” odor machine. Except for the smell machine, we have all material for the show. The slide carousels, and reel-to-reel tapes are intact. As of this writing, they are in the storage locker. That’s why I don’t have exact numbers.  

Pete wanted to re-create the experience of being  up in the hills. “Arc-a-Vision” was Pete’s attempt to create a wide-screen viewing  effect like Cinemascope at the movies. 

Notice the dimensions on most of the “Lost Canyon” pictures from Archive 3.

Arc-a-Vision was showing the slides with the wide aspect ratio on Pete’s home-made tryptic screen.

The soundtrack was Pete’s “music.”  I put “music” in scare quotes because Pete did not play any instrument himself. Pete created the sound track for his show himself, plucking the piano wires on the baby grand in the Hampton living room, and mixing in fragments of classical music, with sounds recorded on location in the hills. 

. This provided background for Pete’s dramatic narration of The Lost Canyon story. Pete did all the voices in dialogue, and many of the bird calls, and animal sounds himself.

The various recordings were mixed into the final product  to be played on tube-amplified reel-to-reel monaural recorders.

Pete went to great lengths to create his smell effects, the better to re-create the experience of being in the hills. He picked bags of plants, and wildflowers from up in the hills. , and made oil infusions of the various blooms he collected. The smell machine itself was Pete’s invention. It was made up of cardboard canisters, PVC pipe,  1” gate valves, and an old canister vacuum cleaner to provide the blower. Pete would soak cotton with the infused oils, and blow the smells through lengths of PVC pipe laid along the rows of folding chairs.

As I mentioned, I don’t have the boxes of slides and tapes with me, so I can’t give exact numbers right now. Suffice it to say that there are thousands of paintings.

All, in all, “The Lost Canyon Trip” is a an odd fusion of madness, genius, and, divine inspiration. It represented decades of hard, lonely work.

Next week we’ll hear from Dee Gayer again, talk about the live shows, and take a look at the Whittier Hills today.

next: The Hills. The Show>