Climbing Central Technical School was hands down one of the funnest climbs I’ve ever done. This mission wasn’t possible solo,so I had to recruit some help from my friend, Gary. I knew his interest would be peaked, because he too attended this school.
(This is where I begin to rant, nothing's ever going to be as good as MTCC so feel free to skip)
We met up at midnight on a Wednesday, and I kicked the plan into action. First step was to climb the Bathurst building and retrieve a ladder from the roof that I remembered seeing on my last attempt.
I quickly picked the lock and removed the chain binding it to a pipe. Lowering this ladder down to street level was going to give Gary and I an idea of how difficult this night was going to be. As you’ll see in the photos, this was no pansy ass ladder, this shit was about 20 feet tall unextended. It was very heavy, very noisy and neither of us could really wrap our heads around how the extension part worked. Once down, we began marching it around to the main building where we planned to climb up. On the way, a cop drove right past us and we casually put it down and started whistling; convincing ourselves that we’d be fine. From here on, we played leapfrog. Our technique was refined over the 6 times we had to do this to get on top of the school; How it worked was Gary would stand on the base of the ladder and I would lift the ladder up by walking towards gary and the wall. After having climbed the ladder, Gary and I would then pull down at the top of it then quickly jerk it in towards us, praying that it wouldn’t fall down.
By the time we reached the top of the school, it was about 2am. There was so much to see up there, huge worm-like vents that wrapped all around the roof, weird attic areas and bizarre early 20th century rooms. We shot for a couple hours around the roof, poked our heads in everything we could and climbed the chimney until we decided it was time to try and get up to the top of the main tower. This was the most difficult part. Prior to this, extending the ladder wasn’t necessary, however to get up this section we were going to have to go roughly 30 or 40 feet. So, Gary stabilized the thing while I propped it up, then I began extending the ladder while he steadied it. After a bit we only needed a few more rungs to get enough height, it was at the point were i could barely touch the extension with my fingertips, so I started jumping and punching it up. By this point the ladder was literally vertical in the air, almost 40 feet of mass swaying back and forth. Every so often Gary and I would have to pull as hard as we could to ensure that it didn’t topple it over, crashing on the vents behind us.
Eventually we got it up, and we began the wobbly climb over. Once at the top I instinctively looked for a hatch as the alternate route down, but it didn’t lead anywhere except for a crawl space. Then, I noticed that one of the 4 pillars on the corner of the tower had a door. With great anticipation I tugged at it, and the hatchy-door slid open. Inside was a spiraling staircase that was so tight we couldn't wear our backpacks when we walked down, and it exited through an old wooden door into the back of an average fucking classroom. I was blown away by the fact that such a cool space was hidden in plain site, disguised as a normal looking closet. After discovering where this classroom was, we headed back up to the tower to shoot for a bit until we were going to call it quits. While Gary shot outside, I was intent on carving my name along with many others that were at the top of the staircase. Then, out of all that writing, one name stood out to me. ‘Gary!’ I called, ‘do you have a brother name Stanley?’ He replied, ‘Yeah dude, why?’ ‘Man, he carved his name into this fucking wall 3 years ago!’ Best way to end the night.
Instead of laddering all the way down, we simply collapsed it from the top of the tower then made our way down through another exited that we found on the roof. Stayed just until sunrise and left through the school as if we were good students coming in early. An adventure to remember.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.