Scared Less

The Haunted Trail 2024 event is officially in the books! To classify that as a relief would be an understatement. It is hard to really quantify what this annual extravaganza takes out of me beyond simply stating that I now weigh over 7 pounds less than I did two weeks ago when most of the physical effort was put into full swing. Attribute that to a combination of stress, labor, lack of sleep and a complete disregard for traditional mealtimes. Up by 7:30am and rarely to bed before 2 or 3 am. Even in those few hours of sleep the brain was still churning on the immense project plan. Is all this effort worth it..you betcha and through it all there was a constant smile on my face. Life is good when you get to do what you love and now that I am retired, that means all day and all night without those pesky meetings ha.

Hit the jump for a quick overview of how things went this year – foreshadowing, there were some very stressful points along the way that could have easily derailed this event.

As in the past, I plan to put a more formal post (or posts) together that covers the effort in more detail sometime in the upcoming months. Today we are just going to hit some highlights and build excitement to read the full report. Give you some specifics, show ya’ some pictures, show you some more pictures and add context where appropriate. To start, we need to go back a year – late June 2023 to be exact. That is when the Tree Root of All Evil took me out and cost me the use of my right arm for a serious amount of time. That misfortune put an end to the planned switchbacks that was supposed to take out a rather daunting hill that has to be navigated to get in and out of the valley where a majority of our Haunted Trail is set up.

After promising everyone that the hill would be taken out of play the year before, I had to humbly apologize for not getting the work done for the ’23 event. The good news is I was able to put in the time to get the switchbacks put in this year. Planned out the path to minimize impact to the trees, cleared it all by hand, tilled the uphill side with a small tiller, pushed all the loose dirt to the downhill side and then mulched the entire length of it by hand carrying 5 gallon buckets to keep the mud down if the weather decided not to cooperate.

I could not be happier with the results! If there was one comment we heard repeatedly over the two nights was how much our guests appreciated the new path – apparently a majority of our attendees are NOT ultra runners ha.

Soon after the event takes place, planning starts on new props for the following year and, of course, fixing everything that didn’t go as planned in that year’s haunt. This year there were some pretty ambitious plans to fit the new theme of “bigger scares” – you can translate that literally as ’23 was an experiment if larger props could generate a better scare. Based on the positive feedback from that test, we have invested in larger items (multiple Home Depot 12 footer skellies, their 5×7′ foot skelly dog) and upped our game on our custom props.

This included a new 9 foot haunted tree and an equally sized Gargoyle. The tree came together fairly quickly thanks in large part to the help from my brother Ron. The Gargoyle was pretty much a struggle from design through implementation. In fact, the Gargoyle didn’t even make it out the first night as we ran out of time to get that monstrosity down into the valley.

Those two new props will get their own posts, but in short I learned a LOT during those builds which will likely carry over through to the next event as a number of the planned features were left in the lab with the time crunch.

On the time front, this year we also had an unexpected commitment come up right in the heart of the prep phase. Linda was asked to photograph a national dog event in Colorado three weeks before the event – that clipped off over a week of prep/build time leaving us with just two weeks to get ready once we finally made our way back from the 9 or so day excursion. We were on our heels from that point on and without the incredible help from Ron we probably would not have made it. We did get to see Red Rocks Ampitheatre again which is one of my favorite places to visit whenever we are near the mile high city.

Once back it was a matter of getting everything down into the valley. We had to lean a lot on our volunteers (The Scare Squad) as this requires a massive amount of labor. Some stuff can go down on the trailer, a number of pieces have to take a gentler way down and others have to be hand carried into the valley. I could argue that I train for ultra runs just to be in shape enough to make those treks up and down the steep hill.

Once everything is placed in the proper zone, the really fun part begins – the build phase where we stretch our creativity to give the best experience for our guests. This work is highly dependent on the weather and this year we were a bit hampered by Mother Nature. Big rains plagued the start of the week leading up to the big nights with a weekend forecast that was troubling at best – expected rains on that Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. We can handle a lot of conditions thanks to spending a lot of time hardening our prop controllers, but rain can add a serious amount of stress as we do require quantities of extension cords and splitters that would empty the shelves of most of our nearby hardware stores. We go rain or shine so we pressed on. Sure enough Tuesday it absolutely poured all day and into the night. That day was dedicated to getting the rest of the batteries in and finishing up putting the props in the right tubs for each zone.

After that downpour, the forecast starting changing for the weekend – the rain chances were reducing much to our surprise. This was even more unexpected as the hurricane was moving towards Florida and that usually increases the chances of rain. By that Thursday, rain had been moved out of the forecast – an absolute miracle. One huge stressor eliminated.

Things were going quite well up until midway through Friday the opening day (still chaos, but manageable chaos). A Scare Squad member and I were adding some new powered props onto the trail when the entire right half of our trail lost power. Ever have one of those “oh shit” moments where doubt starts permeating your body. No power, no event, simple as that. Went into problem solving mode and eventually found myself back at the electrical box for that side (we run everything from two circuits from the house – one for the left half and the other for the right half). The GFI wasn’t resetting…and there was some serious burning smells occurring. We had literally burned a hole through the GFI outlet. Luckily we keep backups so for the next 30 minutes or so hunted down a replacement, rewired everything and got it working. What a relief, but precious time was lost. You have to wear a lot of hats to pull off a haunted trail, hopefully I will not have to use the electrician one very often.

I forgot to mention that Mother Nature had spared us the wet stuff, but replaced it with wind gusts of 20 to 30 mph. Remember that tree Ron and I spent all that time on leading up to the party…well, you will notice it is not together in the shot above. I had it all put together (face section goes on top of the section next to it and there are two huge arms that come out the side. Got it up, turned away to work on the next prop and bam, the wind put it on its side, damaging the arms and ending any chance it could withstand the rest of the night with those winds.

Eventually the clock struck opening time and the guests started arriving. We were in pretty good shape at that point, somehow all the chaos was tamed and the trail was in good enough shape to present. The volunteers shifted their efforts to getting all the sensor turned on and the final touches put on. The props that didn’t get put out would have to wait until the second night. It takes a solid 45 minutes to get everything turned on and powered up – with all the time taken up dealing with issues, I ended up being about an hour late for getting up to the house to greet the guests. Linda has come to expect these glitches and let me slide on missing my promise to her to be done in time to personally greet the first guests.

Luckily the guests are oblivious to what it takes to get this haunted trail set up and based on the feedback over the two days they were extremely happy with the final product. Positive comments throughout the night really made all the effort worth it!

Both nights ended up being rain free and fairly smooth (to our guests ha). I must say, the best prop we had nothing to do with. On the second night I was taking a group of people down when I stopped short on the trail to notice an unexpected addition.

Laying directly in the middle of the trail was a rubber snake..at least that is what the group behind me initially thought.

“Nice decoration Bri”….
“Umm, that isn’t one our props”
“WHAT!?!?!??!”
“Yep, that is a real one”

That experience left a few in the group rattled – nothing like reality to bring a real scare hehehe. I was just thankful Linda WAS NOT WITH US. Technically we were trespassing on his hunting grounds. Slowly it slithered off into the woods likely just as scared of us as a few of our guests were of it.

Well, going to wrap up this quick summary there. Hope you enjoyed a brief look at this year’s Haunt. Stay tuned for a more detailed look in an upcoming post.

Stay calm, haunt on.