Suburban Underground Vadders

Longhorn Quarry:

Run Away!

I’ve been going to the longhorn quarry for a few years and I had only ever seen 1 official patrolling the area. The patrol vehicle was a white pickup truck with an orange flashing light on its roof. The encounter consisted of the truck coming down the center road between the big building and the train station and going right through, not really even paying attention. Still that was something I was not expecting but there were 2 factors that probably caused the situation. The time was earlier than the time which I normally go, around 12:00 midnight and also this was about the time that a construction company started storing equipment in some of the buildings to be used during the day for working on the new bypass.

 The Longhorn Quarry started out for me as being a relatively out of the way and easy to get to place. Then they started building the bypass. Now it is brightly lit and easily accessible from 2 sides but it is still a place that I enjoy going. There was one building, we’ll call the train station that at one time you could walk up 4 floors to the roof without a problem. I did that once before they installed cages and steel doors made out of thick metal and rebar. Now steel and a master lock protect the stairway to the roof… but that wasn’t going to stop us. Marbrough and I started getting back into repelling partly because of this little dilemma. I had the idea to use my grappling hook to throw a rope over a concrete support between two holes in the floor above and use a  ascending technique using prussic knots to climb straight up the rope to the floor above. Everything was set except for a few factors.

The night came when we finally decided to try this out. It was on a Saturday night at… around 12:00 midnight. The crew assembled was myself (revsm), Marbrough, Axis Nemesis, Pale Blue Corpse, The Noize Tech, and the female of the group _____. These were 2 of the factors that made things work out the way they did.

Even though it was a bit of a larger group than we normally assembled, we didn’t expect to have any trouble. We parked in one of the deserted parking lots on the other side of the creek and tree area and assembled our gear. Getting to the tracks on the other side of the tree line was not to terribly hard because we found a nice trail leading to the creek but once to the creek we had to find our own way through.

Once through we followed the tracks to building 6 as can be seen on the map if you click on the satellite photo below. All seemed well as we started unpacking and preparing to toss the grappling hook over the support. I was a little uneasy for the fact that with so many people it is hard to keep the noise down but it was time for the first try to toss the rope over. This throw didn’t even make it to the support before hitting the apex and clanging to the ground. To make things worse there used to be holes in the ground just below The support that are now covered up by… LARGE SHEETS OF METAL. When I said it clanged to the ground it was a resounding clang. Well, that shut everyone up. Ok, we could still do this, it didn’t seem that anyone heard and truly it is pretty far from anyone to hear so we tried again. At least twice more it clanged to the ground before finally making it over the support. Now we tied off one side to a sturdy concrete support on the ground and donned our harnesses.

It was about the time that I started attaching the ascenders to the rope when things went very wrong. Almost without a sound on the dirt road between buildings 6 and seven a vehicle drove by. Now none of us is completely sure what kind of vehicle this was but some of us say that it was a small white pickup that may or may not have had a logo on the side and may or may not have had yellow caution lights on top.

About this time I realized that from their perspective they would be seeing a building almost flooded with light because.. doh! There was one of our handy bright florescent flashlights lying on the ground splashing light everywhere. I fumbled to switch it off as the truck surprisingly drove right by without even slowing down any more than it already was going. A few moments later in the darkness we all agreed that while we still wanted to proceed that it would be a good idea to get the hell outta there before they come back. As quickly as possible we untied the rope and packed everything up but didn’t bother to take our harnesses off for we didn’t want to waste time.

Once packed up I walked towards a part of the building were you could see the direction the truck went through a window where Axis and Pale Blue Corpse were standing watch.

Axis: (whispering) See anything yet?

PBC: (also whispering) …no… no yet, Wait! There coming!

RevSM: (loud whisper) Fuck! Go, go, go!

Again what we saw is still up for debate. It might have been between 2 and 4 people that in the lighting we had looked like one black glob walking towards us and there may or may not have been a dog with them. Either way we didn’t want to find out so we wuz outta there. Now behind this building is a set of railroad tracks with some cars still left on, all we had to do since the floor was level with the tops of the wheels is jump in between the cars to the other side. Unfortunately there was a piece of sheet metal from the outside wall sticking out at the bottom just before the edge. Thankfully it didn’t trip anyone but several of us did brush the metal protrusion and as going by it whipped back and slammed into the sheet metal wall making a loud BANG, bang, bang, bang noise. We were sloppy as hell. Once everyone was out we all dashed for the tree line, a good 40-yard dash. This was nowhere near where we had exited the trees when coming into the place but we all kept going anyways. Once we were in a good way I stopped and looked back to see the same building we were just in engulfed in high powered flashlights. I thought I heard a dog bark so I kept going. We were able to get through the woods at a good pace even without a trail mainly because we were in an area that did not have any bamboo but just as we were reaching the edge we came to about a 30ft thick line of grass about a foot above our heads. Oh well, we made our own trail flattening the grass as we went. We were out with no one hurt, caught or missing. But we still had not accomplished our goal. That’s ok though, we would be back another night to finish what we had started.

At one time all floors were accessible but sometime between 1999 and 2000 the steel cages and doors with padlocks were installed preventing exploration past the first floor… for everyone except SUV. One can somewhat easily gain access to the roof of the smaller building to the left without special equipment but it still doesn’t help with getting to the bigger building next to it because of the 4ft gap and the fact that any accessible windows from that level are covered up with large steel plates.

Here you can see the gap between the 2 buildings and the strange upside down cross imbedded in the buildings concrete support. Interesting design but apparently serves no purpose. There is an open doorway just to the right of this picture that leads inside. Above this door is a sign that says “Caution: Watch for forklifts.”, a warning that you probably won’t have to worry about anytime soon.

Inside the building above is this small office that conveniently provides a way onto the roof but again the nearest window that is not covered by ½ inch thick steel is about 15ft up.

This is a picture taken from about 20 ft to the right of the picture above and is looking straight up through 3 of the 4 floors above. This is the support column that would eventually get us to the floor above using our ascending technique. If you were to look straight down standing from this same position you would see the big metal plates on the ground covering up the holes that would be there much like the ones above.