OH MY RAINBOW SERIES
OH MY RAINBOW FREE

In 1988, Vasquez bought his eight-acre spread for $31,000. “Yeah, I’ve had an interesting life,” he says. Then for the National Park Service, posting public signs and fixing backcountry utilities as a seasonal worker. He worked for a park concessionaire as a security officer, emergency medical technician and a firefighter again. It was the park he visited as a kid with his family. He quit that and found his home in the great Yosemite in 1985.

He then became a Los Angeles County firefighter, jumping out of helicopters for two years. “I’ve always been someone who’s fearless and immensely confident,” he says.

OH MY RAINBOW FREE

As a boy, he ventured alone throughout Los Angeles on public buses, using a free pass because his dad was a bus driver. It began in the barrio of East Los Angeles, where he was born. How he arrived in the Sierra Nevada is tale unto itself. Vasquez evokes an eccentric of the old American West, with a devil-may-care spirit who spins yarns of quixotic adventure. “I’m supposed to unite humanity under the rainbow,” he proclaims. He would give to a humble farmer in Yosemite,” Vasquez says. “Think about it: If God wanted to give a message to humanity, would he give it to a president? No. Most importantly, however, his post-viral experience left him with a feeling of having been touched by something greater. True to showbiz, he won’t say who he’s talking with other than to say it’s “a really big name.”

OH MY RAINBOW SERIES

So you’ll have to forgive him if he’s gone a little Hollywood – or is trying to.Īnd why not? He says he’s in talks with “one of the biggest entertainment companies in world” for a reality TV series – about him, his wilderness retreat, his tattered mobile home with holes in the floor, and his new effort to lose weight. He’s so iconic in our era of social media that YouTube headquarters even named a gathering space after him, called the Double Rainbow Room, he says. He’s even in an in-flight safety video for Delta Air Lines. Vasquez has done Jimmy Kimmel and commercials for Microsoft. People in Iceland built him a throne when he visited. Strangers have flown him to Brazil and New Zealand to shake his hand and chat. The world has embraced him and his infectious enthusiasm since he first posted the video in 2010. ‘God wanted to give a message to humanity’

Oh my rainbow