{"id":2074,"date":"2011-05-12T15:44:29","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T22:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/?p=2074"},"modified":"2011-05-12T15:44:29","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T22:44:29","slug":"abandoned-mine-shaft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/2011\/05\/12\/abandoned-mine-shaft\/","title":{"rendered":"Abandoned Mine Shaft"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Eton Mine, Lucky Boy Trail, Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA.<\/p><\/div>\n

[One in a series of posts<\/a> from my spring 2011 trip to the southern California desert.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Joshua Tree National Park<\/a> is beautiful, but much of its history (prior to being designated a National Park) has scarred and pockmarked its landscape. In the Gold Rush<\/a>, the Joshua Tree hinterlands held some of the most productive mines in California until well into the 1900’s. These mines were big, sprawling, and deep. To my knowledge, no Balrogs<\/a> were released as a result. But that would<\/em> explain a lot about Golden State politics.<\/p>\n

We hiked on some lesser-traveled trails and found an acre of land with no fewer than five vertical holes in the ground: Mine shafts. They were all wired off and had metal grates over them. One in particular, the Eton Mine on the Lucky Boy trail<\/a>, had warning signs on the wire fence surrounding it.<\/p>\n

It was quite windy that day, and I just knew I had to get the creaking, squeaking sounds of this battered sign on the rusty wire. It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out how to protect my handheld recorder<\/a> from the wind, but ultimately I decided to use my body as a shield and then stick it under my microfleece hoody<\/a>. (I had the OEM fuzzy windscreen on it, which is one of the most useless strips of fabric I’ve ever seen, er<\/em>, heard.) I just hoped that my body protected it from the 25+ mph wind gusts and that the fabric wouldn’t dampen the high frequencies too badly…and because of the sound, I had high-frequency content to burn.<\/p>\n

With some judicious noise reduction in post – subtle, as always, gives the best result – it didn’t come out too shabby, considering the horrible recording conditions and super-no-budget wind blocking techniques!<\/p>\n

[soundcloud url=”http:\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/15163504″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
\n[Sony PCM-D50 recorder, capsules at 120\u00c2\u00b0]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[One in a series of posts from my spring 2011 trip to the southern California desert.] Joshua Tree National Park is beautiful, but much of its history (prior to being designated a National Park) has scarred and pockmarked its landscape. In the Gold Rush, the Joshua Tree hinterlands held some of the most productive mines […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,63,4],"tags":[172,279,9,282,10,62,75,281,22,94,321,18,15],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2074"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2165,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074\/revisions\/2165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}