Murphy' s Ranch

Another weekend means another adventure! I spent all of Saturday catching up on my adult things like oil changes and laundry, but Sunday I was ready to hit the road again, especially now that its hitting the 100s in Bakersfield. My friend Katie is 7 month pregnant, but she still wanted to go hiking and exploring.

As with most of my adventure, we found an interesting place online and decided to pursue it. This one was more mysterious then most trails I have on my list and Katie was all about finding it. It turn out in the hills outside of LA there was a Nazi compound in the late 40s, early 50s. A guy named Herr Schmidt escaped before the Allies liberated Germany and decided he would start up his own Nazi party in Los Angles. The CIA raided the place in the 50s and has been abandoned ever since.

We got very detailed instructions off the internet, as the trail was a little sketchy to find. But we luckily we found the right hole in the right fence (Not trespassing, don't worry) and walked a nice fire road until we came to the 500 step staircase.

 Going down was easy. The stairs were a little small but overall an easy stroll down into the valley.

At the bottom of the stairs and rounded the corner and we found the house of Herr Schmidt.

Since it's been abandoned for over 50 years it was in pretty rough shape and covered in graffiti. Very creepy but very cool.

There were lots of people around exploring the area, even people with dogs and kids. I was a little more daring then Katie and climbed up on to the roof on a sort of sturdy ladder. You might be able to see me sitting on the roof below.

We continued along the path and continued to find deteriorated, graffiti metal. Not sure what most of it was, but it was all really cool.

We walked around for a while more but it was getting hot and the other Katie was getting a little tired, so we decided to turn back. Which meant going up every one of those 500 stairs again.

We took a different set of stairs back up, which paid off as we found a graffiti water tower at the top. Like all of California, the water tower did not have water in it.

After a long day of hiking, we had built up quite an appetite. Luckily, Katie had info on a german restaurant down in Venice Beach. And there is nothing better then a bockwurst and a Kolsch beer at the end of the day.