Grandpa Ray’s got a secret.
And he wants you to find out what it is.
Out beyond 29 Palms where the roads turn to dirt, the proximity of neighbors dwindle, and you find yourself on unincorporated county land that stretches unpeopled in almost every direction, there is a simple, solitary ranch house with an unpainted fenced yard. It’s a settler house, one of dozens built on 40-acre parcels out here in the mid-fifties.
A door code gives you entrance to a neat, well-appointed little two-bedroom home. Music from a local radio station greets you. The décor of the home isn’t just an attempt at an artfully staged time capsule from seventy years ago. The details of the rooms give the feeling that whoever lived here decamped not that long before.
Olga Trehub
Wild Heart Ranch
You set your bags down to wander the rooms and the small backyard where there is small studio apartment, a plunge pool, and a hot tub. There are also a couple storage sheds and a strange, tall structure festooned with “Wild Heart Ranch” neon. It’s locked but you have the distinct feeling that you may gain access to it at some point.
Back inside, you notice that the tsotchkes and other eclectic ephemera appears strangely connected, as if the previous occupants had been engaged in some sort of esoteric research, one involving mining for semi-precious stones…or did it have to do with alien visitation? You’re drawn to a desk with a typewriter. You haven’t even unpacked your Trader Joe’s bag and you’re already looking for clues. This one leads to a hunt throughout the house that eventually yields the identities of the original residents. This clue, in turn, leads you to a complicated gadget that requires you to fiddle with an unfamiliar device. The device is activated. A recorded voice greets you.
Olga Trehub
“….Hello, my crystal hunters. It’s me, Raymond Hart, founder of the Wild Heart rat. Don't worry, I'm not trapped in the radio. This is a recording I've left for you to find. And my gosh, you have. Now, listen, I can't say too much right now in case someone overhears, you have officially begun your quest to discover my secret power crystals here on the ranch. Pretty cool. Right now, I've enlisted the help of my incredibly clever and charming grandchildren, Flora, Aura, and Cyrus. They're going to help me protect the secret of the crystals. So, I'm sure that you'll be hearing from them. Yes. Now the next thing I need you to do is to go open my desk, even though the big one between the bookshelves. Now, once inside I'll be able to tell you much more about your journey. Now to access it, you're going to need a key. Of course, I do love my keys, and that's why I put them on display. The old gray matter ain't what it used to be. And I often forget which key is for what. So, I attached a little crystal heart like this one to make it easier to find the one for my desk. Now, I'd suggest using something on the ice box to help you retrieve it…”
You don’t want to give up the hunt, but you should put away the lava cakes and rapidly thawing Argentinian shrimp. Take it easy. Maybe pop a pale ale and consider the situation.
You’ve got all weekend to unravel Grandpa Ray’s mystery.
There are several names for what goes on at Wild Heart Ranch. Sometimes they’re known as puzzle or escape rooms. Some people call them immersion experiences. The idea is a sort of manned or unmanned experience that involves and envelops the observer (or audience). Forty years ago, people staged elaborate, period murder mysteries in their homes in which guests worked out which of them (sometimes in period attire) might be the murderer. The immersive experience has evolved significantly since then. Groups such as Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf created an elaborate interactive art environment in a disused bowling alley. They have since expanded to Las Vegas. For the last dozen years, Sleep No More, an immersive theatrical experience combing Macbeth and film noir that takes place at the McKittrick Hotel in the Chelsea district of Manhattan and is produced by the English theatre company, Punchdrunk.
Wild Heart Ranch is the brainchild of Blake Hodges-Koch, who devised and created the experience with his wife, Bea, and creative partner, Thomas Meston. Hodges-Koch, a low-key, Southern Californian who worked in the film industry and ran a production company for “15 to 17 years” prior to the pandemic. He is not new to the desert. His great-grandfather once worked a gold claim called the Red Cloud Mine, about 30 miles east of Coachella. “You’ll see the exit for it from the 10 freeway,” he says. As a kid, he and his family would go “out to the mine and explore the ruins of it. The desert has always been very much part of my family and our history.”
In 2018, before he and Bea were married, he says that one of their first weekend trips together was out to Joshua Tree. “At first, we were going to Palm Springs and then I said, ‘Hey, do you want to do something more off grid?” They found an Airbnb in Landers. “The second we stepped out of the car, she (said) ‘I love it here. I want to move here.’ She’s from Chicago…this was totally foreign to her. It was only six months later we started looking at property out here. And this one of the first spots that we were shown by a local agent.”
Hodges-Koch says that the land and three buildings on the property were “a great value,” and when he and Bea first moved out to the property in 2019, their goals were modest. They thought they could derive some income by turning two of the buildings into short term rentals. In the meantime, he commuted back and forth to LA for film work.
The pandemic put an end to that. Sequestered on their funky desert estate, Hodges-Koch said they had plenty of time to devote to renovating the houses on the property. He said that the idea of merging the rentals with an immersive experience had always been in the back of his mind, but it really took shape during the period of renovation. Together with Meston and a group of friends were artists, technicians, and fabricators, they were able to put Wild Heart Ranch together in just six months.
Though he says that the initial immersive experience “was very very bare bones…very simple,” they have been constantly evolving and layering the experience with more and more details for the last three years. “The concept we came up with was this family led by…a patriarch named Grandpa Ray, and they’ve been living here since the fifties….Grandpa Ray discovered this mysterious power emanating from the land, and he decided to move his family here and dedicate this life to researching this power and figure out what’s going on. And eventually he learns how to harness this power. And then he uses his family to protect this power, protect the secret of the land by creating these puzzles so that people and they don’t know how the access [the power] unless they can solve [the] quest.”
Hodges-Koch believes that Wild Heart Ranch is unique among Airbnb properties, though he admits that there may be other immersive experience short term rentals in the world. In fact, Hodges-Koch and his wife purposively did not advertise or try to market the immersive aspect of Wild Heart when they first started renting it, afraid that guests’ expectations would not be met while they were still in the process of layering the narrative. The process is ongoing. After they’d built out the experience for the main house, Hodges-Koch and crew worked out a separate but intertwined narrative for the smaller guest house at the rear of the property…a space ‘supposedly’ inhabited by Grandpa Ray and his wife where the mystery somehow involves the old Route 66. Hodges-Koch says that he is currently working on an immersive experience for a vintage trailer on the property. A pink house on the other side of the property (appropriate called ‘The Pink House’) may also one day be the site of more puzzles to be solved.
Interestingly, word has spread from former guests and an informal network about Wild Heart Ranch and Hodges-Koch says that their dependence on Airbnb for bookings “is beginning to dwindle a bit…Most escape rooms just do direct bookings, which we’re starting to look at now because we’re getting more people who seek us out because they hear of us through the escape room community or different platforms that promote escape rooms.”
Toward the end of the visit, Hodges-Kock takes his visitors directly to the conclusion of one of the mysteries. It’s entirely unexpected, a magical space created with the collaboration of an artist named Maria Finney. The space is clever, imaginative, and slightly surreal. It would ruin the puzzle to give too much away, but at one point Grandpa Ray’s granddaughter, Aura, speaks. In part, she says, “Despite what Silas or Flora might say, I’ve always believed in Grandpa Ray the most, not like mom, dad, and Flora. They always joke that Grandpa spent too much time in the sun or frying his brains in the energy channel… but I knew he was doing something special.”
Curious about what Grandpa Ray was up to way out in 29 Palms?
