Good morning!
Well it was an excellent weekend down in Denver. To recap quickly:
I got to Denver Saturday evening and we went to the local camera store to look for parts. While at the store Rai mentioned that she had a feeling we’d be needing some really long lenses on the trip tomorrow… Sunday morning we got off to an early start and made it to the Pueblo area at around 11 am. On the way Aryntha spotted a tower off to our east, which turned out to be “Pinon”, and we could only get about 2 – 3 miles from it thanks to all of the no trespassing signs and locked gate, and Aryntha didn’t bring his 300d and 400mm lens set.
We should listen to Rai…
We drove on to our first target for the day; the two sites near Boone. We drove around the tower for Boone R for about a half an hour without being able to get much closer than about a mile and again we wanted the long lenses we decided to leave behind. We finally decided that we’d return with a better idea of how to get to it and move on to the next site on our tour when Aryntha suddenly asked “What’s that?” while pointing to the north.
Aryntha led us to Boone RS, a true relic of the Cold War. Boone RS is an underground facility designed to survive a near miss with the best bombs the Russians had in the 60’s. As we pulled up there were no signs anywhere as to who now owns the site or that we should stay away, and the front gate was wide open… So we did what anyone would do and just drove onto the facility proper.
Boone RS has a rather immense parking lot which is actually the roof of the buildings several feet under ground. We took about a zillion pictures of anything on site that didn’t move too quickly to photo including the neutron detector that signaled “the end” to the rest of the network.
After ensuring that we could reconstruct the entire site, life sized, from photos we moved on and headed back south…
“Cedarwood” proved to be extremely difficult to find and had us driving around in the scrub brush and cacti for about three hours. After the first hour and a half we could finally start seeing the tower on the bluff to the south of us which let us home in a little easier… Tower hunting would work best with a helicopter…
Anyways as we were trying yet another road that should take us to the site Rai, who was referencing maps in the back seat, asked what road we were on and Aryntha replied “A.T.T.A.V.E.”. This prompted us to wonder if there was a road out there named for the tower site that was on it.
Well it turns out that Aryntha was right because about a mile up from where he mentioned this we saw the sign for “AT T rd.” I swear he’s a phone psychic.
We pressed on another mile or so until we came to the locked and “no trespassing” sign covered gate for Cedarwood and took some more “sunset and tower” postcard shots.
We returned whence we came, stopping at a Mexican joint in Colorado Springs that was really quite good. We even got some freshly-made-just-for-us signature hot sauce which was really impressive. It’s a recipe from the sister of the fellow who was our server.
We got back to the apartment, did the data-dump, and did the sleep thing.
Monday morning we were back at it and off to a few more local sites including some suspicious stuff down near Martin Marietta. This day Aryntha brought the lenses and 300d for long shots… See, we learn. 🙂
We opted for some close-to-home sites due to the fact that Aryntha and Rai have to head back to school today and needed to make sure they were prepared.
We got some photos of what we believe to be the Kessler Reflector and then took off for a short mountain hop to the Critchel site.
Critchel is about a half hour drive up 285 towards Evergreen, then another half hour jaunt out into the hills. We got to the site and took our photos, then took pictures of the view from there… A nice thing about tower hunting is the places AT&T put them lead one to really nice views.
We left Critchel and headed back to the apartment for the data-dump. I took off for the hills at about 4pm.
Today it’s back to the day-to-day. 🙂