I realized about 1PM today that it was only about 75 degrees and figured today was about a good of a day as any to go make a trip out into the mountains. I’ve been wanting to visit this AT&T Long Lines Auxiliary Station (Repeater) Site since I moved to town, so I packed up my camera, hiking boots, water bottles and all of my gear and headed out.
I fully expected to be forced to park at the side of the interstate because the gates are almost always locked up tight, but that wasn’t the case. Not only wasn’t it locked, it was wide open. I’ve never been able to drive up right to the RF boundary fencing around a commercial / government tower site before, but I did today and was semi-glad that I did. My parking spot completely obscured my car from anyone going by on the interstate.
Over the top of the building in the photo below you can see another flat topped tower in the distance which is an another AT&T Long Lines Aux Station. Normally they’re 25-35 miles apart, but they needed two within 1.5 miles of each other in this case because of the orientation of the pass through the mountains.
The tower site is (currently) unused and now owned by American Tower Co. The original KS-15676 horn antennas and all of the RF hardline have been removed from the tower so it’s now just a hulking steel tower with nothing on it. In their time Bell Systems, AT&T and the Federal Government took the security of these sites pretty seriously.
These sites are almost always impossible to get into. They’re thick solid concrete with zero windows. The only openings in the building are the heavy steel entry door, a 3’x3’ rubber and steel cable gland where the RF hardlines pass through the wall and the various vents / exhaust pipes which contain blast valves to close them in the event of a sudden overpressure (bomb).
I spent a good two hours just hanging out, shooting random pics and playing with exposure bracketing for HDR. I hiked around, took photos from the peaks of nearby hills and generally had fun. It was obvious that the facility no longer had power just based on the condition of the power boxes outside. This place would require new electric runs from the nearby poles if it were ever to be used again.
I could clearly see that the cable gland where all of the RF hardline passed through the outside wall was missing and I could have quite easily crawled my way into the building if I had something to throw over the barbed wire and climb the fence. Honestly, I was feeling pretty lazy today and wasn’t really up for jumping fences and low-crawling into a dark building with no windows which may be inhabited by animals.
For the hell of it as I was packing up to leave I grabbed the door handle and gave it a turn. Sho’ nuff.. the damned door was unlocked. It looks like someone had bashed on this SFIC door lock so hard with something like a sledgehammer they’d actually managed to free the lock housing from the door. The lock is now literally just sitting in a hole in the door doing nothing. From a distance you just couldn’t tell and I’m hoping that most people in the future just assume the place is locked up tight.
That’s all for right now. I’m planning on making a trip back tomorrow afternoon and will explore the building itself. All I had on me today was one pocket-sized flash light and figured it would be safer to return when properly equipped. I also didn’t have my neckstrap on my camera today and would prefer to be able to have my hands free when entering a place for the first time. I’ll post more after I go back.
[All photos taken with a Canon EOS Rebel T5 /w 24mm f/2.8 STM Lens]
-NMPatriot (Ric)