A few weeks ago, my buddy and I decided to finally investigate the huge silos across the street from his house. Apparently they're left over from an old cement business that closed up long ago.
Here's a quick pic I ripped off google maps
We had no trouble getting in.
The first thing we found was an old schoolbus! People from nearby highschools hang out here sometimes, so we didn't linger too long.
We quickly moved on to the task at hand: Scaling the silos themselves.
There were no open exterior doors, so we decided to take the ladders (in the rain!)
The climb took about 10 minutes, mostly because we were cold and damp and didn't want to risk our safety.
Once we reached the top of the ladders, there was a hole in the wall that led straight in! Someone had been so kind as to leave us a measuring tape to show us just how far we'd fall if we were to slip.
The interior was pretty bland, consisting of a concrete floor and a few pipes jutting out. We found an elevator shaft, but power had been long cut from this building so our frantic button-mashing was fruitless.
There was a short flight of stairs inside, leading to the roof! The view was absolutely gorgeous, but my terrible phone camera couldn't get enough light to show it off.
After hanging out at the top for a while, we decided to climb down and check out the under construction train tunnel in the area.
It took us about a half hour of carrying our bikes through mud and up and down ledges to get where we wanted. After finally hopping a few last fences, we made it down right into the belly of the beast:
We biked this for about 10 minutes till we had to get up and carry our bikes again. There was a lot of active construction equipment we were careful not to disturb.
This was the end of our journey, so after dragging ourselves over a few more fences we made it out only partially coated in mud.
I learned a few valuable lessons:
1. Don't go in dirt filled holes when it's raining
2. Don't climb slippery ladders when it's raining
3. It's really hard to take photos in low light
Even with all those pitfalls, it ended up being a spectacular trip and I really want to visit those silos again soon.
Hope you enjoyed my first exploration post! More to come soon, hopefully