Outside the shrine in the Forgotten Temple, I mull over my options for extraction. Simplest, easiest, and perhaps best would be to transport out using the Sheikah Slate. But I would like to explore this area more, and see if there’s anything else to find.
I carefully explore the room where the shrine is located, and the only way in or out that I can find is the way I came in. I don’t find anything else in the shrine room, no weapons, chests, or anything else. So I cautiously emerge from the shrine room, and destroy the first Guardian at the doorway, breaking a Dragonbone Moblin Club in the process, and gather a bunch of ancient technology parts. Nearby I find a chest with 5 fire arrows in it.
I’m still a long way to the main exit of the Forgotten Temple, and there’s at least a half dozen Guardians between me and freedom. I figure I may be able to advance to a point where I can fight one at a time, from a point where I’m behind cover from the rest of the Guardians nearby, and take them out one at a time. This will be a slow process, and the biggest disadvantage of this approach is that I’ll wear out probably 1-2 weapons per Guardian, and since these Guardians don’t drop any melee weapons for me to pick up to replenish what I break, I’ll probably run out of weapons by the time I get to the end, or if not I’ll be nearly depleted of arms, and vulnerable. All the ancient technology drops I’ll pick up from destroying these Guardians won’t be worth the price in weapons.
The only thing to do, then, is to make another run for it back through the gauntlet, and dodge their fire. I visually assess the route through the room that I want to take, and go for it.
The key to dodging Guardian blasts is to run from point of cover to point of cover, if you can, and then when under cover, wait for a while until the Guardian stands down and resets. If you can’t do that, you can dodge their blasts by listening for the audio cue that tells you when their charging countdown is up, and then change speed or direction. The surest method is to jump right as the blast goes off, and or to touch the sprint button for a quick burst of speed for maybe a half a second. The Guardians also seem to have a hard time tracking you if you are gliding at full speed, so they’re unlikely to hit you if you’re gliding when they fire, unless they get lucky, or unless you’re too close or if you’re moving directly away from them, so that they don’t have to traverse to hit you.
By doing short bursts of sprinting, you can avoid depleting your stamina meter, which is it important because you need that stamina to glide, as well. There’s a few sections in the temple where you need to glide, and you’re stuck if you run out of stamina.
Long story short, I pull it off and manage to escape the Forgotten Temple. Getting in and out were both pretty exciting, and make me realize that I’ve come a long way in terms of skill and knowledge of the game, as well as power-ups from where I was about a month ago. This would have seemed all but impossible back then, where now it’s a challenge, but do-able with a little planning and forethought.
Now that I’m outside the Temple, I don’t have a lot of options. I can either try to climb out of the canyon, or I can walk along it for its length and see how far it goes.
It goes, it turns out, an extremely long way. I walk seemingly forever through the desolate, mostly empty canyon. I encounter very few monsters down here. Most frequently I run into packs of 3-4 wolves, who, being predatory animals, will try to attack if I get too close. The best thing about them is that they’re easy to kill with a Sheikah bomb, and they drop raw prime meat. Best of all, if you kill just one, the rest will run away, much like real world wolf packs. It seems like I run to a new group of wolves about every few hundred yards, and so I stock up on a lot of meat along the way. I occasionally see Lizals, but they’re lying dormant, easy to spot despite being camouflaged, and I mostly avoid them. Occasionally giant chuchus will pop up, but they are also easy to bomb, or simply outrun.
I continue running down this canyon for two straight game-days. At one point, my sheika sensor picks up a shrine nearby, but it seems like it must be above on the rim of the canyon, so I just ignore it and move on.
Here and there, I find a couple of korok seeds, but they’re pretty sparse around here. But I’m also not looking that exhaustively for them, either, so it’s possible I could have overlooked some. But anything that looks like a likely spot for a korok seed that I check out, I find a seed. I get up to around 145 seeds.
Eventually I come upon a Goron, who invites me to play his golf game. For 20 Rs, I can smash a ball with a hammer and get it into a hole. No thanks. I don’t expect the reward to be worth the time spent, so I move on. Somehow, I end up getting turned around and come back. Well, OK then, fine, let’s play golf. I use the Time Stasis power to freeze the ball, hit it, and my aim is pretty good. My first shot goes off the course, but after that I get it into the hole in 3 tries, which, with the penalty stroke, gives me a total score of 5, and earns me 50 Rs, for a net profit of +30. Yeah, very much not worth the time.
Moving on, I continue still further down the canyon, and it seems I’m now south of Rito village (I could see the canyon from the village spire when i was scoping out the surroundings) and closer to Gerudo Desert than I am to Rito village.
My sensor picks up another shrine nearby, and this one I decide to try to find. After a little triangulation, I climb up out of the canyon, and search, and eventually find it, well hidden under a large flat rock that I have to knock out of the way with time stasis and the free iron sledgehammer that I obtained for playing Goron Golf. Maybe it’s good that I stopped there after all.
This shrine is a wind puzzle, solved with wind generated by korok leaf. The shrine starts out with a chest containing a korok leaf, and I have to leave a weapon behind to equip it. So long, iron sledge hammer. The shrine is one of the largest I’ve been to, and involves platforms floating on balloons, spikes that can pop balloons, wind-driven turbine switches, a lot of vertical updraft, and a couple of baby guardians to fight. It takes a long time to clear the shrine, but I’m successful on the first try without dying, so it’s not very difficult to figure out what to do, just time consuming.
There are several weapons chests in this shrine, including a Thunderspear, but I still have a Thunderspear that I found elsewhere some time ago, so I leave it, but I collect my spirit orb, and emerge, uncertain of where I should try to go next.