It was reading Thompson as a teenager that made me want to write for a living. Walking there during the day, I found myself lulled into a state of meditation. It now marks the heart of a labyrinth, picked out in red rocks that were placed there by Anita several years ago. There is still a piece of rebar buried in the ground where the tower once stood. The command centre … Kevin EG Perry with Anita Thompson at Owl Farm. Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, picked up the $3m tab for that elaborate sendoff, which took place shortly after Thompson killed himself in 2005. A short walk uphill is the spot where Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky from a 153ft tower in the shape of a “Gonzo fist”, a logo he first adopted during his unsuccessful 1970 campaign to be sheriff of nearby Aspen. It sits beside the main Thompson home on a 17-hectare estate marked with hoof prints and elk droppings that gradually rises towards a mountain range.

In April, Thompson’s widow, Anita, began renting out the writer’s cabin to help support the Hunter S Thompson scholarship for veterans at Columbia University, where both she and Hunter studied. The only sound anywhere is the warm hum of this electric typewriter and the mechanical rhythm of its key strikes, as clear and certain as gunfire. Even the peacocks he raised are sleeping.

Owl Farm, Thompson’s “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, is dark and silent outside.

I t is 4.30 on a Thursday morning and I am writing these words on the big red IBM Selectric III that once belonged to Hunter S Thompson.

Hunter s thompson 1971