The ashes of Hunter S. Thompson were blasted from a cannon taller than the Statue of Liberty over his Colorado ranch at the weekend. A crowd of friends, including Thompson’s illustrator Ralph Steadman, the actors Bill Murray and Sean Penn, and the Democratic Party’s one-time White House contenders John Kerry and George McGovern, drank champagne as the “Gonzo” journalist and gun enthusiast went out with a final bang.

Johnny Depp, who played him in the film version of his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and paid for the $2.5 million “blast rites”, hugged Thompson’s son Juan as 34 fireworks carrying the writer’s ashes lit up the sky.

“He loved explosions,” the writer’s widow, Anita, said.

The pyrotechnic send-off was perhaps the most unusual departure since the ashes of the counter-culture guru Timothy Leary were launched into orbit along with those of Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry in the first “space funeral” in 1997.

Thompson’s ashes were fired from a 153ft high “supergun” topped by the double-thumbed red fist that was his symbol of “Gonzo”. The cannon was built around a hired industrial crane. The fist sat atop a giant dagger, in a strange inversion of Saddam Hussein’s crossed swords monument in Baghdad.

Thompson would “probably say it wasn’t quite big enough”, Steadman 69, told the Aspen Daily News after flying in from London for Saturday night’s ceremony. “We want him back,” he said. The occasion “was a kind of pleading for him to come back — all is forgiven”.

Thompson, who coined a crazed first-person journalism in the 1960s, had spoken back in the 1970s of having his remains scattered in a huge explosion across his Owl Farm in Woody Creek, near Aspen.

Known for his drug-fuelled antics, Thompson once shot an assistant while trying to chase a bear off his property. He invented a game called “shotgun golf” in which players shot balls out of the air. In one book he recounted blowing up a Jeep with explosives just for fun.

In planning his send-off, the family had reviewed a 1978 BBC documentary entitled Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood in which Thompson had outlined his plans during a visit to a mortuary.

“We had talked a couple of times about his last wishes to be shot out of a cannon of his own design,” Depp said last month. “All I’m doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out.”

The ceremony took place six months to the day after Thompson shot himself dead in his kitchen at the age of 67 after struggling to recover from spinal surgery and a broken leg.No suicide note was found but he was at his typewriter with the word “counsellor” in the centre of a page. The paper bore the letterhead of the Fourth Amendment Foundation, which defends victims of unwarranted search and seizure.

The invitations to the weekend’s ceremony were inscribed with a quotation from Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, describing the farm as “a very important psychic anchor for me, a crucial grounding point where I always knew I had love, friends and good neighbours”.

Mrs Thompson, 32, is seeking a permanent home for her husband’s archive of 1,200 boxes. New books are planned, including what she calls a “small book of wisdom” based on her husband’s advice. “ ‘Never think you’re the smartest one in the room. And never think you’re the dumbest.’ Little things like that,” she said.

IT’S WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE WANTED

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