This was once the property of Nels Jacobsen, the farmer who supposedly made fence with slats from a Viking ship. "You will say I am crazy, that I lose my water and get thirsty and see dreams, but it is the truth." And whatever he made was hard-won. Perhaps the most plausible tale of a ship lost in the desert involves the pearling expedition of Señor Juan de Iturbe in the year 1615. I will honor his request, but will note that it's kind of refreshing—and indicative of Grasson's character—that what he fears might be salacious wouldn't even make a fifth grader's cheeks turn red. this year. And I am glad he said it, for it would have been deflating to have his search voided by a single paragraph in an 80-year-old book. Those "round metal disks"—the superior comals Santiago promised his wife—suggest a Viking ship that would have sailed through the Northwest Passage, down the coast of Canada, around Baja California and up the Colorado River, which before a modern-day diversion flowed into the Gulf of California. A Viking ship. According to the Imperial County Farm Bureau, the area is also "home to one of the largest catfish farms west of the Mississippi.". Even Grasson concedes that a part of it should have remained above ground. Grasson pointed to a passage about "Came From Afar Men—the strange whalers who cooked whale meat in an enormous iron pot, ate it and drank the oil." Recounting the episode later, Botts said she and her husband saw the ship but couldn't reach it, so they vowed to return the following day, better prepared for a rugged hike. Reach her at kristin.scharkey@desertsun.com or on Twitter @kscharkey. Most notably, how would a ship get into the middle of the desert? The route Evans took came nowhere near Canebrake Canyon, and the ship Evans claimed to see was Spanish, not Norse. The editor of Desert Magazine during the 1960's, one Choral Pepper (2002), in her book Desert Lore of Southern California (1994), Chapter 3: Anza-Borrego Desert in a section called "Legend of the Lost Viking Ship" writes about a reported find of a single shield-like artifact somewhere close to or in Deep Canyon, near Palm Springs. "If you gotta guy who spends 10, 15 years looking at one particular story," Grasson said one day over breakfast, "and you got an academic who spent maybe a summer or two—you gotta realize who really knows more.". Grasson had mentioned meeting someone who claimed to have Spanish armor from the ship (he asked me not to reveal the names of these people, because they fear being harassed by treasure hunters). So they left and decided to come back in a few days. Newsweek is drawing attention to a search for California’s lost Viking treasure ship Breaking News tags: California, Spain, Viking, Archeology. It is today believed by many to be under the Salton Sea in California. The lost Spanish Galleon stories began after the Colorado River flood of 1862. The desert ship is buoyed by legend, but scuttled by facts. Grasson is convinced his ship is buried on a farm near the sad, parched town of Imperial, but won’t say more because he doesn’t want the area to be overrun by “a bunch of idiots wrecking private property.”, while working on a story about desert conservation, Meet Death Valley Jim, California Desert's Best Hope, WWII-Era Tunnel Unearths Story of Lithuania's Jews, The 'Hole' is 12 Feet Below Street Level and About A Century Behind the Rest of New York, Camel Hair Was the Glamour Garment of the 1930s, Rikers Island Guard Guilty in Beating Death of Prisoner, New Bridge Reveals How Little South Africa Has Changed, How Endangered Species May Fare Under Trump, Extinct Tasmanian Tiger Was Smarter Than We Thought, Why Trump Won't Move the U.S. Embassy in Israel, Inside the War Between Trump and the Media, Trump is Standing on the Wrong Side of History, Beijing Is Becoming the Global Champion of Free Trade, he said on the Death Valley Jim Radio Program. In the rugged Colorado Desert of California, there lies buried a treasure ship sailed there hundreds of years ago by either Viking or Spanish explorers. Now Grasson wants to head back with a Geonics EM-61 MK IIA, a kind of ground-penetrating radar used on The Curse of Oak Island, a History Channel show about 140-acre plot of land off the Canadian coast that has hosted even more mysteries than the California desert. To get to Imperial, you skirt the western edge of the Salton Sea and head through the unnaturally fertile Imperial Valley. The Desert Magazine covered the mystery of the desert ship for the first time in 1939, when writer Charles C. Niehuis described a strange encounter he'd had with Jim Tucker in Prescott, Arizona. The Lost Viking Ship Quite possibly buried in the 1933 earthquake, a lost Viking Ship apparently resides in the Anza Borrego Desert State Park in San Diego County. Almost 500 of the 1,373 people on board were airlifted off in bad weather. Some time ago, he listened to a recording made by a farmhand named Elmer Carver. "Could a ship pass through here? In the rugged Colorado Desert of California, there lies buried a treasure ship sailed there hundreds of years ago by either Viking or Spanish explorers. We were driving to the Jacobsen farm when I saw it in a grove of trees behind which stood a modern-looking house: pointed directly at us was the wooden prow of a ship. Traveling to San Bernardino, Evans came into a valley that was "the grim and silent ghost of a dead sea," presumably Lake Cahuilla. To continue reading login or create an account. We drove on an unmarked road to a striated formation of rock, a neat horizontal line dividing the cliff face into light and dark sections, as if it were an expertly layered ice-cream cake. Look back at historical accounts, and you'll find little proof. "Those who hold to this theory as the only solution of the mystery insist that almost all the exciting tales that come out of the desert are due to mirages.". Hell, yes.". By the time Myrtle and her husband had set out to explore, amid the blooming poppies and evening primrose, the story of the lost desert ship was already about 60 years old. Selling mattresses can't be an easy job, nor an especially profitable one. Botts claimed it dislodged rocks that buried her Viking ship, which she never saw again. The nearby U.S. border is a popular crossing for undocumented immigrants. This indicates the waterline of Lake Cahuilla. In the parking lot of a small Indian casino where we stopped for lunch, Grasson pulled from the back of his Jeep a copy of The Last of the Seris, a 1939 book by Dane Coolidge about the indigenous people of Tiburon Island, in the Gulf of California. ( The-Wanderling) There are many places to cast doubt on the Botts’ story. In it, he claims, Carver describes an incident in 1907, when he was invited to work on the farm of Niles Jacobsen in Imperial, a town about 15 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. There's no way a historic ship is buried beneath the California desert. But others must be allowed to live, because without such nourishing nuggets of wonder, life can shrivel up into an endless series of tasks, captured and measured, posted on social media, forgotten. Einstein once said imagination is more important than knowledge. That tribe, he says, is concerned only with self-enrichment, willing to abuse property rights and historical artifacts in the pursuit of some long-lost trove. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. John F. Kennedy will stay a paragon of 20th century liberalism, no matter how much we learn about his philandering, drug use and mafia associations. We stood for a moment, watching the white bird pass. Totally insane, right? More likely, Grasson has concluded, the ship is closer to the Mexican border, where the land is dusty and flat, where the dry riverbeds have names like Coyote Wash and the irrigation canals have names like Wistaria Lateral Eight. In 1870, for example, explorer Albert S. Evans was traveling to San Bernardino, Calif., when he claimed to have stumbled on its remains. He then told Petra he'd been exploring the mountains north of the border when, in a "narrow box canyon," he saw "a boat of ancient appearance—an open boat but big, with round metal disks on its sides." The Jacobsons eventually divorced and left Imperial. The land is featureless except for the brown jags of mountains that squat on the horizon. Let us only believe that which is shared with us on Facebook. Lost Viking ‘highway’ revealed by melting ice 1,000-year-old horseshoes, sleds, and tools are emerging from a shrinking ice patch in Norway, telling the story of the rise and fall of a mountain pass and the people who travelled along it. In the Los Angeles Daily News of August 1870, the ship was described as a half-buried hulk in a drying alkali marsh or saline lake, west of Dos Palmas, California, and 40 miles north of Yuma, Arizona. In the early 1970s, Lawrence Justus sought permission to enter Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in Borrego Springs, Calif., for “the purpose of locating certain artifacts,” according to documents obtained by The Desert Sun. But they did leave a trace, and Parcak's team were determined to pick it up, however faint. Lost Viking Ship in California? By John Grasson. "I don't think that has anything to do with the lost ship of the desert," Grasson says. It was early March, so the desert would have been in bloom, its washed-out yellows and grays beaten back by the riotous invasion of wildflowers. There has changed many times, dotting the landscape of the Colorado Desert with visions of a ship that never quite docked at the port of reality. I didn't want to ask how much money Grasson made, but every indication was not much. Some believe that one of Cardona's captains lost a ship full of black pearls in Cahuilla, but Grasson concluded this couldn't be because Cardona's book suggested his fleet consisted of frigates, which would have been unable to sail up the Colorado. It could easily be viewed at a distance of several miles from a mesa that lay between Dos Palmas and Palma Seca, California. Melting glaciers in Lendbreen, Norway have revealed a lost mountain pass and artifacts that were used by the Vikings. Like many others who lived in or near Los Angeles, Grasson found real-estate prices pushing him East, into Riverside County and beyond, ever deeper into the desert, until he ended up in Banning, where he has lived for the last 11 years. This created a waterway that reached inland as far as the valley currently known as Imperial Valley, California, would have provided easy access to the deserts of southwest America by ships. The possibility that there is no ship at all, he simply won't entertain. He became an avid visitor to TreasureNet.com, an international clearinghouse for those seeking Jon Swift's silver mine deep in the Appalachian Mountains or a vault made by the Knights Templar on an island off Nova Scotia. That took three days and cost $500. Born in Cleveland in 1957, Grasson enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and worked as a cook. It's only as his work has become better known—he was on Myth Hunters, on the American Heroes Channel, the History Channel filmed an episode for a show about unexplained phenomena (he isn't sure when it will air), and he recently shot a pilot for another show, which could air on a major channel (Grasson asked me exclude details of this last production) —that he has gone out there more and more, as a field guide to and custodian of the desert ship myth. One of the most intriguing story lines of the Lost Ship saga, is whether there could have possibly been a Viking voyage in which one or two ships were lost. "[Their] science basically started with a treasure hunter looking for gold." Unfortunately, that very day, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California. Viking ships were marine vessels of unique structure, built by the Vikings during the Viking Age.The boat-types were quite varied, depending on what the ship was intended for, but they were generally characterized as being slender and flexible boats, with symmetrical ends with true keel.They were clinker built, which is the overlapping of planks riveted together. One morning, a prospector appeared in the couple's camp with news far more astonishing than a new species of desert flora: He'd found a ship lodged in the rocky face of Canebrake Canyon. Let us slink back to our cubicles and never speak of the desert ship again. Imperial is a sad, low town eternally under a hot, low sun. Yet there are believers who insist that, using recent advances in archaeology, the ship can be found. We deprive them, but we also deprive ourselves, crowding an already-crowded world that needs fewer "shoppes" and more places of solitude. A cache of Viking artifacts discovered in the Arizona desert launches Scott Wolter on a quest to find a lost Viking ship that legends claim is buried somewhere in the Southwest. But those who believe in its existence point to the way water once covered this arid landscape. The desert is a changeable place, but not so changeable that an entire ship can disappear from view overnight. Searching for California's Lost Viking Treasure Ship By Alexander Nazaryan On 2/2/17 at 9:00 AM In the rugged Colorado Desert of California, there lies buried a treasure ship sailed there hundreds of years ago by either Viking or Spanish explorers. Many parts of the California desert are now patchworks of green, unnaturally fertile land that is a reminder that long ago, there was much more water here, including the vast but now barren Lake Cahuilia. When knowledge is sparse, he has to let his imagination do the work. "This guy from Skeptoid is grossly misinformed," Grasson says. 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