Suburban Underground Vadders

Longhorn Quarry:

All the way to the TOP!

The tallest building in this picture has a spiral staircase leading to its roof.  The building is actually shaped like 2 cylinders stuck together on one side. On the left-hand side of the building in this picture in between the two cylinder is where the staircase has been placed conveniently out of view of the Wurzbach pkwy.

Here is a night shot of the spiral staircase where you might be able to make out the steel door  in the center of the picture that USUALLY prevents anyone from getting to the top.

However, one night when Marbrough and myself were looking around and trying out Marbroughs new 1^st gen Russian night vision scope we looked up and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The door was hanging wide open. Excellent! I quickly ran up to the Door and found that the lock was still intact but the metal piece that it had been locked through had been cut clean off, apparently by a torch of some sort. It took me about 2 seconds to decide whether or not to go all the way up. If I didn’t go I knew I would regret it and I would go even if Marbrough wouldn’t. Fortunately he was as willing as I was and was equipped with an old video camera that uses the full size vhs tapes to record. He turned it on and slung it over his shoulder to record the trip up.

It was interesting after a few revolutions we were already pretty high, a few more and we were looking down on the enormous  building across from us, a few more and we could see the horizon. We also noticed about 2/3 of the way up that there really wasn’t much holding the staircase to the building. Whoa, a little dizzy now. Ok, better… keep going. By the time we got to the top our knuckles were white and our hands were a little shaky but the view was absolutely beautiful. There was very little in the way of guardrails so we kept to the center and sat down for a bit. I decided that since earlier that night Pale Blue Corpse opted out of the expedition I would call him up on my cell phone to tell him about our discovery and our triumphant conquering of the concrete monolith. We called him up to find that he was to drunk and partied out to care… Bastard!

Then Marbrough looked over and realized that we weren’t really at the top yet. If you look at the first picture above you can see that there is a little silo-like thing at the top that actually has a set of stairs to the very top.  So we decided that if we were this far, we were going all the way.  We sat for a bit videotaping the skyline and decided that it was enough and the fact that this little silo thing was swaying slightly in the night breeze made it feel like a good idea to come down.

Just before starting down I was looking at the base of the silo and first noticed that we were being held up there by not much more than 4 thin pieces of metal with X crossbars in between and also my eye caught… a little switch.  Now one does not normally expect a switch in a place like this to work but I forgot that this particular building actually has power and is used to store construction equipment. I flipped the switch and at first nothing seemed to happen, but slowly a low roaring noise started coming from nowhere in particular. I tried to turn it off but it didn’t work. Crap. We decided that since we didn’t know what it was and the fact that it was kinda getting loud it was time to go.

About ½ way down we realized that it sort of sounded like a ventilation system or something and would probably not cause any problems but if I’m not mistaken there is to this day a low rumbling noise that fills the air surrounding the building that was not there before.

All in all it was quite a rush and well worth the trip. Also the next time I came back I found that the door had been fixed and locked tight. I knew I would have regretted it if we didn’t go up.

Also, soon we may be putting up some screen caps or short clips of the video we took of this trip.