Suburban Underground Vadders

Longhorn Quarry:

General Info

Here is a satellite photo obtained of the Longhorn Quarry from GlobeXplorer. Click to view a simple map of the area that I made.

This is a view looking north from the new Wurzbach parkway. Damn the development.

This is a picture looking north from the same Wurzbach parkway.

This is the sidewalk that follows alongside Thousand Oaks dr. There is a guardrail between the sidewalk and the oncoming traffic but it’s really not to reassuring if you notice that much of it is badly damaged by repeated contact from fast moving traffic, not to mention it might be a little suspicious for someone to be walking down this way in the middle of the night but the only alternative would be to try making it through the woods where you’ll have to worry about  thick bamboo that reaches 8ft above your head and a creek that always has at least a little running water.

Here is a nice panorama taken near the intersection of Wurzbach pkwy and Thousand Oaks dr. at sunset. The building to the left is the largest building that is filled with water, the tall one in the middle is the one with the spiral staircase to the top, and on the right is the long building that housed the long kiln-like structures leading to the 3 smokestacks.

This is a view of building number 8 on the map. This is the next mission for SUV, to access the upper floors that might actually provide access to the upper floors of the bigger building next to it. This building is also very interesting for the fact that it has an accessible basement that is partly flooded and somewhat maze-like.

This is the same building above where you can see the guard railing around the big holes in the ground leading to the basement below.  Luckily between the railing and the wall are steps down. If you were to look up from this spot you would see the stairwell leading to the roof but is inaccessible and strangely enough doesn’t seem like there ever was access to this stairwell. Soon enough though SUV will make another mission to reach the stairwell and find where it leads.

On the right-hand side of this photo is probably the largest, volume-wise of the buildings in the Longhorn Quarry.

This is a bad digital pic of the inside of the large building in the picture above. At one time this area was not filled with water but small mounds of dirt with remnants of caution tape warning of asbestos.  Around 98 or 99 they piled some dirt in the way of the only place for water to drain. Now inside this building is nothing much more than a large lake that by virtue of the chemicals in the soil or something has turned the water dark black like oil.

This is a picture from the inside of the long building that housed the 3 large kiln-like structures that led to the 3 smokestacks. For as long as I have been comeing here there has only been one of the three tubes remaining. When this picture was taken it was not so hard to get on top of the arch structures and to get inside the kiln. Unfortunately this time I did not have a flashlight and it was completely pitch-black inside. The next time I tried to take a look at it the opening of the tube was newly fenced in by large pieces of steel welded together. Now it is even harder to get up there because there was big pieces of ½ inch steel plates bolted in places that made the way up nearly impossible without equipment.

This is where the 2 missing tubes would have connected to the building that has the 3 smokestacks on the other side.

Here is where those same tubes must have connected with the large water filled building. There is some very strange looking dust in this vicinity that could be hazardous.

Looking back towards the building with the tube standing in the same place as the picture above. On that second floor on the other side of those windows was a small control booth with all of the wiring exposed and no actual controls remaining.

Here you can see the arched structures that would support the long steel tubes leading to the smokestacks.

A decent view of the smokestacks from the end of the large black-water filled building.

The brush and plant life between buildings 7 and 3.