TEAM JONES CANNON
The Team Jones Cannon is a fully functional black powder cannon, and is pictured above.
It measures 42½ inches from muzzle to cascabel and is mounted on a naval carriage.
It shoots a lead ball or slug the diameter of a golf ball. It was built by a very good friend of ours,
Tom Hayob, who lives in San Diego. We usually take it to the Mojave Desert in California
twice a year to make lots of noise and smoke with other like-minded (lunatic?) friends.
This is the link to the official Cannon Party Website
designed by Jef Johnson. There are lots of pictures of the various characters and
cannons that attend these events.
Desert Blast 12
Twenty four hours of great folks having a very LOUD time!
Andy was surfing the net for cannon sites, back in May of 1999, and ran across a page
about an event called Desert Blast (DB). DB began over a decade ago when Bob Lazar
(yep, of Area 51 fame) and a group of his friends would meet at a secret location outside
of Las Vegas, Nevada to shoot off their homemade fireworks...and other things.
Bob's associates include lighting and effects types from Vegas and Hollywood,
physicists, engineers, and lots of people just into noise and smoke.
It sounded like a very productive way to spend a day in the desert...Vegas is NOT that
far away...and they happened to mention cannon shooting in one of the articles linked
to the site. Andy sent in an email requesting an application for next year, since the
link for registration said this year was full. Bob mailed back, told him to pack up his
cannon and come on down for this year's event...and the rest is history.
There is no way to communicate the full impact of a Desert Blast experience. It's
kind of like a great rock concert or a shuttle launch. You have to be there to "get" it.
You can see some of the highlights by doing a Google search for "Desert Blast" ...fireworks,
cannon, aircraft, explosions, the odd four-wheel drive stagecoach...but it's the people
that make it such a rush. There are no rules, just like the advertisment says. This is
possible because folks who play with fire don't need written rules - they know that the
price for being irresponsible can be extreme. There were ultimately about six hundred
people out at the site. Probably four hundred of those folk brought something to shoot,
ignite, fly, or demonstrate.
It was fabulous..Andy had never gotten to shoot a car with his cannon before. That
was after he put a roundball through a Whoopi Goldberg movie poster at a hundred
yards (o.k., second shot..needed one to adjust!). He was interviewed by the Learning
Channel for a documentary about extreme hobbies. Unfortunately, he was pretty well
into heat exhaustion by that time, and looked it. Since he was speaking what sounded
like some Slavic dialect rather than English, and covered in salt rime from sweating
completely out, it's questionable whether he will survive the editing process. Just
have to wait and see.
The night of DB's main fireworks display was spent in a lounge chair with a bottle of
water in one hand, and the camera shutter release in the other. The noise and smoke
was continuous from twilight till about three a.m...Andy's face was numb from concussion
till the following Tuesday. The minivan upholstery still had some chemical odor weeks
later, too. Imagine the grandest fireworks display you ever saw...then stretch that out
for ten hours, throw in salutes (spell that g-r-e-n-a-d-e-s) exploding fifty feet in
front of your camp, and waking up long enough to see a jet car in afterburner humming
by at a hundred plus miles per, and you have a little taste of what DB is like.
Special thanks to Dumont and his wife for allowing Andy to recover in their trailer...and
share their camp for the night's events. Thanks also to Tiny and Darlene for letting him
use their shower to wash away the salt that was making the night a living hell, and for
using their four-wheeler to recover the cannon from the firing line. Andy was truly
destroyed by the heat that day, and was still under medical treatment days later.
BUT IT WAS WORTH IT!
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This page was last updated 8:30am MDT 4/21/2009