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Subterranean SF: Fort Mason Tunnel
This is a placeholder to remind me to post the photo album of exploring the hidden Fort Mason rail tunnel.
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Going Down...: Beneath Hawk Hill—Exploring underground Battery 129, Marin Headlands
Many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, as I was simultaneously just breaking into and away from the San Francisco underground art scene, some folks I used to run with said elusive phantom stranger John Law had called for a bunch of us to meet up for mysterious purposes, as he was wont to do.
Hopping into some cars that night, we caravaned out along the twisty road into the Marin Headlands, parking some distance from Hawk Hill and walking there under cover of night. Once we arrived at the observation platform on top of the hill, someone produced a shovel and began to dig in the dirt, down a foot or two until hitting a rock. We pulled the rock out, and, to my surprise, underneath was an overturned 5-gallon bucket. We pulled out the bucket, and under that, to my…
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When They Pry It from My Hip, Ironic Fingers: Exploration & Explosions, a Nevada Desert Hipster Road Trip
NOTE: Some of the activities documented in this photo album, like a lot of what goes on in the Black Rock Desert during the off season (when seven different government agencies aren't there standing by to protect you from yourself), fall firmly in the "Don't try this at home" area. Or even in the "Don't do this at all" area. Seriously. Don't do any of what you see here. You will get yourself killed. We had preparations and precautions which are not described here. And one of us almost got killed anyway.
Back in Spring 2003 I got wind that a bunch of folks I'd met through some fin de siècle attempts to revive the soggy corpse of the SF Cacophony Society were heading out for a road trip through northern Nevada, to do some exploration in the abandoned American Flats silver refinery in the hills outside…
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Beneath Berkeley: UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels Photojournal—Urban Exploration
Back around 2005-2006, as social media took off, I was a member of an urban exploration chat group, memory fails but it was probably something on Tribe or Friendster. Mentioning my interest in the UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels—a fabled network of sometimes-dangerous underground utility tunnels cross-crossing the UC Berkeley campus, which had once been well-traveled by intrepid explorers but had since been sealed off, with all access supposedly welded shut, although as of this writing I can find no evidence online of this other than an absence of any reported explorations after about 2001, and one or two scattered online claims of later access (which happen to jibe with the experience I'm about to relate)—I was contacted by privately by an old-school liberty-spiked homeless punk kid named Spider, who said he knew a way in.
After a preliminary meeting to…
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Beneath the Bay Area: Battery Dynamite — Subterranean Bunker Urban Exploration
somewhere beneath the Bay Area, Aug 6 2004
Last July, my late* trubbamaking companion was trying to find a shortcut down to the beach when he noticed a hole in a fence across the road, where someone had cut it away to allow a tree limb to grow through. Characteristically unable to resist, he climbed through it to explore, and, in a fantastic piece of luck, deep in the woods behind this fence he stumbled onto the surface entrances of what we only later learned was Battery Dynamite, a sprawling underground military facility dating back to World War 2. Several weeks later he brought me there, camera in hand, to explore the corridors of this creepy subterranean relic...
*Repeat visitors to this gallery will notice the change in epithet. In summer 2005, my former intrepid trubbamaking companion was killed in a freak dating accident. Don't mourn for him. He knew…
