Back around the turn of the millennium, as I was simultaneously just breaking into and beginning to be repelled away from the San Francisco underground art scene, some hipsters I used to run with said elusive phantom stranger John Law had called for a bunch of us to meet up after dark for mysterious purposes, as he was wont to do, in the hills on the the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Hopping into some cars that night, we caravanned out along the twisty road into the Marin Headlands, parked some distance from Hawk Hill, and walked there under the stars. 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, before hitting a fair-sized rock.
We pulled the rock out, and, to my surprise, underneath it was an overturned 5-gallon bucket. We lifted out the bucket, and under that, to my even greater surprise, was a narrow passage, like an overgrown rabbit hole, going down into the ground.
To give you an idea, I'm not a big guy physically, but that night I happened to be wearing a leather biker jacket, and this hole was just wide enough to admit me and the jacket's bulk... a tight enough squeeze enough that one guy got uneasy, and volunteered to sit watch rather than crawl down into this mysterious, claustrophobic underground passage, missing out on everything that followed.
One by one, each person in our party crawled head-first into the hole, like a rodent, straight down into the ground.
Overcoming my natural survival instincts and crawling down into the hole myself, I found that it quickly opened sideways into a horizontal underground gap in the dirt, a few feet high, big enough for an adult to crawl through on all fours. And somehow... the people who went in right ahead of me... weren't there.
Crawling just a few feet through this mysterious dirt cave, suddenly, to my left were two horizontal concrete slabs, one a foot or two above the other, with enough vertical clearance between them for an adult to fit easily through. Sticking my head into the gap, I saw it opened straight downwards, and shining my flashlight down, I saw a vertical concrete shaft leading straight down maybe 75 feet, with a rusted, caged rebar ladder running down one side of it. It was down this ladder that those who crawled into the hole right before me had disappeared.
I got on the ladder and climbed down.
The below is a photojournal of what I saw at the bottom.
The never-finished, subterranean Battery Construction 129 lays below Hawk Hill.
The gap and shaft we climbed down was the narrow top extremity of what used to be an old military lookout point over the Pacific, before it was covered over at some point after WWII by a hill, and a park built on top of it... long before the 1980s, when the huge battery doors further down the hill hadn't been welded shut yet and the interior was still accessible to the general public from the road we'd walked up, and one intrepid provocateur climbed the shaft, scrambled out the former lookout opening, dug his way out and up through the dirt, and popped out of the ground in the park on top of the hill, to the surprise of nearby parkgoers, before marking the spot by burying an overturned bucket with a rock on top of it, then filling in the hole back in so nobody would spot it.
Note: Unfortunately, you can't get into Battery 129 at all any more. A few years after my visit, some incredibly foolish egotist led a History Channel documentary film crew down the hole and brought them down into Battery 129, letting them film it all. The History Channel televised the video, which was seen by local officials, who recognized the location, and called in the Parks Service, who promptly filled the entry shaft full of expansion foam, dug up the entry hole and filled it with a massive concrete plug, permanently sealing off the last remaining access point to this hidden underground wonderland. (Some later detail provided by Marin Magazine in 2011 and a short KQED newscast about the closure, including the last video from inside the bunker.)
It's still down there, though, pitch black, huge, and still as a tomb. Right now. Right this minute. It's still there.
John, in his element. This is the entrance shaft we had to climb down, ladder at right.
The main gallery, at the bottom of the ladder. The interior of this complex used to be open to the public, hence the preponderance of 70s and 80s-era grafitti.
Graffiti, left over from when this place used to be wide open to the public in the 1980s.
In the main gallery. (the bald man is the late paul addis, who later gained a sort of national notoriety for prematurely torching burning man in 2007, leading to one of the greatest mugshots ever.)
In the large hallway that ran the length of the complex.
At one end of a long hallway, this sealed door led to the outside world.
The stairs down from the doorway.
One of two "altars" , large concrete blocks in the main gallery. The few explorers who get into this place traditionally leave notes and gifts here for posterity.
The second "altar". (if I recall correctly, "url" was the "urban research league", a group of people consisting of paul addis and a few other friends who consistently did such stupidly dangerous daredevil stuff that most people I knew avoided them.)
The curl of cigarette smoke is a reminder of the long-ago days when I had that habit. Graffiti indicates a groover has been here.
The bottom of the concrete entry shaft and ladder. It's easy to forget, looking at pictures, that we explored this all by flashlight, not by camera flash, and the whole experience looked much more like this photo than the others.
The area at the bottom of the entry shaft, off the main gallery.
The climb back to the surface, up a ladder up to a former lookout point. Since the complex was buried, the lookout point at the top of this shaft is now buried under several feet of dirt, and since about 20 years ago, concrete also, making us among the last people to see the inside of this place..
