This was a few years ago now, and my friends and I and a few of our dads were on an off road trip through Death Valley. We had been driving for days out into the most remote parts of the desert. Our jeeps and truck were loaded to the brim with fuel, water, and spare tires. We hadn’t seen pavement in at least a hundred miles. The last town we came across was a place called Ballarat. The population was one man and four dogs. We bought sodas from his store by the can, they were $5 a piece, $10 if you wanted a cold one.
We left Ballarat in the late afternoon and headed deeper into death valley’s more remote Canyon regions. We made camp on a ridge overlooking the valley and for the first time I realized that it was winter. It had been obscenely hot for most of the trip save the early mornings, but this evening the wind was cold and sharp and bit straight through my clothes. We ate some hotdogs cooked over an open fire and made jokes and went to sleep for the night.
The next day we decided to head up a canyon which led to the abandoned Barker Ranch. On the way we blew a tire and stopped for a few hours to make sandwiches and explore an abandoned mine. Someone had left a bucket of old roofing tar torches that we spent almost an hour trying to light, unsuccessfully. The mine and its dark mysteries remained untouched.
Eventually we started back up the canyon, tire now repaired. And a few hours later we came to the Barker Ranch.
It was an old southwest style building, cute in an abandoned kind of way. Old native American looking curtains still hung in the windows, slowly rotting and turning to dust. The main house was connected to a side house by a large patio which was covered in a natural wood pergola. We on loaded our gear onto the patio just as it started to snow.
Several people set up a tent inside the old side house and others including myself ventured into the main building. The inside was incredibly well preserved.
The dry desert air.
There was a lovely kitchen nook where we sat and drank cocoa and laughed as we ate our dinners. The house had wood burning stoves throughout, and seeing as it was freezing and pounding snow outside we lit them and hoped to God the house wouldn’t burn down around us.
I had started feeling sick during the drive and soon realized that I had actually fallen ill and was about to be bedridden for a very uncomfortable night. I took the first bed I found in the big bedroom and set myself up to weather out the night.
The stove warmed the room very well and melted snow dripped through from the roof. The night passed slowly and uncomfortably as the wind shook the walls and the fire sputtered as snow fall down the chimney.
The next day the world was white, and we had oatmeal and coffee to warm ourselves. We read passages of helter skelter that had been left there by others before us. And one of my friends crawled into the cabinet where the FBI had found Charlie Manson when they raided the ranch decades earlier.
He had lived there for some years, the Barkers vanished of course when he moved in. The Manson family made that remote place their home. They dropped acid and planned a string of murders in LA.
It was just a normal bed though, cold and damp and uncomfortable in the winter. But once it belonged to Charlie Manson, cult leader, psychopath, serial killer.