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This weekend a group of my friends down in LA decided to meet Brad and I in Death Valley for the Surprise Canyon Hike. After the Yosemite Hike I felt like I could conquer anything. This however, was an equally intense hike. Up, up, up for longer with a Pack on. Very very exhausting.
The night before we stayed in a little motel 45 minutes outside of the place were were about to hike. We woke early Saturday packed and ready to go. Our first stop lead us to Ballarat Ghost Town. There was a Jail that doubled as a place to stay when they didn't have prisoners, old rusted cars and dilapidated structures. After getting a few cool recordings and wandering a bit we continued to the trail head to begin our hike.
I started not so happy concentrating on what hurt and how much further it was. About 2 1/2 hours into it I started to forget about that more and more. We came across some beautiful waterfalls that we had to hike up, an old rusted truck that provided us with great car foley and some donkey bones. The donkey bones were pretty intense. I actually
needed bone bouncing sounds for the game I'm working on so I put my rock climbing gloves on and we recorded dropping the pile of bones. Kinda icky but fun.
Shortly after that we stopped and ate lunch in the shade. We were only 1/4 of the way there ah!!! Forging on we eventually came across a pretty creek. This was the last source of water before being at the destination so we filled up and used Brad's sweet new water purifier wand and we were good to go.
We saw a few groups of people while filling up our water who assured us it wasn't much further. That gave us hope and when we finally saw the red brick tower looming in the distance we thought we were home free. No! It was very deceiving, it took another good hour before we were standing next to it.
When we finally reached the cabins other people were there, and directed us to The Castle. I was skeptical and so comfortable and didn't want to walk an further but i'm glad we did. The Castle was a secluded magical cabin with the best sounding wooden door i've ever
heard.
We stayed there for the night, exhausted with a cute little iron stove and a nice crackling fire (which we recorded)
The next morning we did a bit of browsing and found rusted tun can and junk heaps that sounded pretty cool. We also wandered around a Mine shaft and various other rusted buildings and then began out hike back down.
We carefully made our way back down slippery waterfalls, rocks and battled getting lost a few times, but finally we reached our car. Exhausted and excited from journey we just went out we headed out just in time to catch the beautiful sunset.
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