It stretched away as far as my light would shine so I started heading down it. It was a little scary the higher I got, but that was to be expected.
He led us around to where Armour Meat was, since I didn't know the way there myself, then we parked and started loading up our gear.
Louis area and did a little exploring while we were there. If I'd seen it going up before I climbed up on those rungs, I would've stopped and gone the other way. We had more gear than normal, because we were planning on doing some fancy rappelling stuff off of the smokestack. We had more gear than normal, because we were planning on doing some fancy rappelling stuff off of the smokestack.
It was basically a moment of mind-numbing sheer terror.
Before we actually left the roof, though, we saw someone walking down inside the building through the skylight.
Sometimes, to get from one section of floor to the other, we would have to force open another rusty door, although we weren't damaging them. However, the smokestack came out of the roof of a pretty wide industrial building.
As we were heading out, she was just coming into the room, and we chatted with her a bit. It appeared to run the entire the length of the building. The water, however, looked about five or six feet deep, so there was no point in breaking out the waders we'd brought with us.
Judging by the looks of it, a bum had apparently been using this part as their apartment. We weren't really even sure which end of the mall we'd come in from, and we were reluctant to look down at the end of the mall where the strange person had been trying for unlocked doors. From there, we were able to go down a floor to another section we hadn't been able to access, and it was the same way. There was no ladder, but someone had propped a rectangular piece of scrap against the wall.
However, it didn't take me long to discover that all the doors were locked from the outside or simply didn't open at all.
One of the rungs at the top was missing, which forced me to put both feet on one rung to reach the top. My little near-death experience had left me pretty shaken up, and I'm usually pretty unflappable. While we were there, I found a window at the back and began looking out of it. We had more gear than normal, because we were planning on doing some fancy rappelling stuff off of the smokestack. As it was, once I finally got back down past those rungs, I had left some of them bent down at forty-five degree angles.
It was of the large room below the smokestack with huge machinery it, and it definitely captured the coolness of the decaying plant.
For another, I had underestimated just how hard it would be to futz with the carabiners while perched precariously on a ladder. The bottom floor was filled with all kinds of random junk, again just stuff you'd expect to see at a garage sale. He led us around to where Armour Meat was, since I didn't know the way there myself, then we parked and started loading up our gear. Louis area and did a little exploring while we were there.
We had more gear than normal, because we were planning on doing some fancy rappelling stuff off of the smokestack. I ended up finding a door that was labeled sub-basement, but it only led into a different area of the the basement. And let me just say, because it's absolutely the truth, that I have NEVER been that scared in my life, not even close. They were so covered in debris that I had Hiccup go around to another stairwell while I went up the cluttered escalator. I'd been expecting the top of the smokestack to be fairly thick, but it was actually only like two bricks wide, so I ended up having to straddle it. One of the rungs at the top was missing, which forced me to put both feet on one rung to reach the top. From there, we went over to the base of one of the smokestacks, which extended about eighty feet or so up from the roof.
The bottom floor was filled with all kinds of random junk, again just stuff you'd expect to see at a garage sale.
My little near-death experience had left me pretty shaken up, and I'm usually pretty unflappable.
They had us pose for a few shots on the edge of the roof. It appeared to run the entire the length of the building.