Expedition 5 - Wyoming? |
Commander Chainsaw surveys an Atlas E site in southern Wyoming at dusk (thanks to Sub-Commander Big E for this excellent photo) |
One good thing about having this website out is hearing from our readers - one reader has earned himself an honorary agent membership in Subciety for providing us some intel that allowed us to locate an Atlas E site in South-East Wyoming. I got some specifics from him on Friday morning, before noon that same day I had 5 agents ready to head out there Saturday morning. Sub-Commander Big E did some more research on Atlas sites in Wyoming and we got coordinates for 5 or 6 Atlas bases around Cheyenne. We met up at the park and ride off I-25 about 40 miles south of the Colorado / Wyoming border. I arrived first and wasn't there too long before "Stretch" and Agent Borland showed up. It was at this point that I had the most difficult situation I've yet had to deal with as commander of Subciety. As usual I asked Agent Borland if he had brought a coat with him, he always does but he never wears it. It has become a running gag. It was at this point that we noticed Stretch was wearing SLACKS and LOAFERS - not approved Subciety Expedition apparel, I assure you. I immediately demoted Agent Fonzie aka "Stretch" to the rank of "Sub-Agent" and sent him to Taco Bell to get me some lunch while we waited for others to show up. Sub-Commander Big E arrived with a PDA full of Atlas base coordinates - we punched the lat's and longs in to my GPS unit. Agent Quad failed to show, which is a shame considering he owns the Subciety Command Vehicle (aka minivan) that would fit all of us and our gear comfortably. Luckily Big E had convinced Mrs. Big E to let him use her SUV. "Stretch" showed up with our lunch and had stopped at a nearby Target and purchased himself a real pair of boots. His Agent rank was reinstated at this time. We dumped gear into the truck and headed north. Along the way we fantasized about getting access to facilities like Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Norad and some other interesting targets in the Colorado area. The closest target we had was about 18 miles west of Cheyenne; we headed out on a back road from the highway and spent about an hour and a half trying to get close enough to pickup a visual. We finally saw it (right off the highway, our dirt-road excursion had been for not) - We ended up in an under-construction housing development. I could see a pickup truck parked on the base from our vantage point, it looks like it was inhabited. After about another 40 minutes of looking for an access road we decided to head for what our honorary agent had said should be an easy access site. Passing back through Cheyenne we stopped at the entrance to Warren AFB and took some pictures of the missile statues they have near the main gate. Again heading north I started pulling up some of the other target locations on the GPS. About halfway to our destination we came within a mile and a half of an Atlas D site, we took the "obvious with GPS" access road and got within sight of the base. There was a barbed wire gate across the road but since we were in fairly plain site of a couple farm houses and part of the highway we decided to check it out once night had fallen and we again headed north. The location of the Atlas E base was exactly what had been described, and dead on with the coordinates. The gates were wide open and there was no signage indicating that we were trespassing or on private property. Like most of these sites it had been fairly well vandalized. It also looks like someone had tried to stretch a tarp across the launch doors to keep water out of the facility, I don't know if you've ever been to Wyoming, but the wind is constant, cold and "brisk" would be an understatement - the tarp never stood a chance, it was in shambles. That reminds me, it was dead calm when we went. You can ALWAYS count on it being windy in Wyoming...ALWAYS. But while we were there not a gust, bizarre. Going to Wyoming and not having a lot of wind is like going swimming without water. After a quick surface survey we geared up and headed in. The entry door we came through slants up to a T intersection, left to the missile facility and right to the personnel facility. We went left. The Atlas E bases are also known as "Coffins" - the missile lies horizontal underneath the 3-foot thick concrete doors. To be fired the doors had to be opened, the missile winched to the vertical position, fueled then launched. There was a lot of dust so the pictures didn't turn out for shit. There was a nasty stench in there too, smelled like skunk, thank god for respirators. We poked around a bit, found an escape hatch, lots of trash, a couple little rooms. There was one entire room that had been filled with dirt; the layout diagrams indicated this was the fuel storage area. We also found the skunk, dead, down in one of the weird holes in the floor. We headed back to the T intersection and headed down the tunnel into the habitation area. This section had been fairly well torched. The whole place was trashed, lots of litter and tagging. Strange though, there was one pristine porcelain sink that hadn't been smashed. There's a lot of ventilation equipment in there. We went topside and had a smoke. We noticed that someone had pulled the pyramid top off of one of the vent stacks over the habitation area, we could see this 2" metal plate that goes over the top of the shaft and can apparently be screwed down to seal the shaft, and it was open a crack. I felt bad for the poor soul that had gone through all the work to remove the little roof only to find the armor plating blocking their access, I guess the door hasn't always been open. We enjoyed a beautiful plains sunset, loaded gear back in the truck and started heading south as the sky got darker. |
It was full dark by the time we arrived back at the access road for the Atlas D base which is about 2 miles long. Thinking we'd have to "loosen" security a bit before we could get in we killed the headlights as soon as we were out of site. I was riding in the bitch seat at this point having lost the "shotgun" contest on the way back to the car to "Stretch". It was a bit spooky and Sub-Commander Big E was really cruising, from my vantage point in the back seat I couldn't see shit. We knew that somewhere a couple miles down the road was a barbed wire fence. Lo and behold when we got there the gate was open! It had only been a couple hours since last we were there. This was a bit creepy. We spent quite a few minutes scanning the base with binoculars looking to see if there were other visitors present. It was dead calm, no sound, no lights. We decided to head in. We got about 100 yards down the road and someone had planted big wooden pillars right in the middle of the road, someone else had been kind enough to cut a path around them - up we went to the base. The main entry gate was open, we headed right around the "loop" the road made around the base and came up to the first building. We parked the car a couple hundred yards out from the building, geared up, smoked and headed on over. There's a big trench that runs along the front of the building, about 8 feet deep and 60-80 feet long and 20 feet across. We went around it. There were what looked to be some garage bays on the south side of the building - also some enclosed rooms, there was some vandalism but not nearly as much as at the E site we had just been at. Some of us went into the garage area and found some stairs that led down to a room or corridor that was flooded about 4-6 inches in water. I went in through one of the rooms and back through the door on the north end and fond the gantry room. The building was your typical metal farm building construction and we couldn't figure out what the big beams jutting of the sides of the roof were, they were actually there for the roof to slide open, they were all open, and I'm guessing we have some deal with the Russians to keep them open so they know we aren't parking missiles in there. The main room must have been 120' long and 50' wide, the remains of a rolling door on the east end and two big garage doors on the west end. The really cool thing in the room was the gantry itself. It must have been 25' tall and after looking at it for a bit we figured it must have been what lifted the missile from horizontal into the firing position. You can see it in the pictures and to give you an idea of scale the bottom picture shows that Sub-Commander Big E is standing about 10 feet back from it, he is well over 6' tall. When the missile was flipped up the base was suspended over the big hole in the floor and we could see out the west end doors that there was a huge trench, 200' long and 15-20 feet deep lined with concrete. So, basically, when the missile was fired the exhaust would go down the hole and be vented down the ditch. Pretty cool all in all. Agent Borland climbed the ladder on the west end of the room, not much up there. We went out the door on the north side of the missile pen and saw there was more building on the North side, one door had been cinder blocked up and I was thinking we'd have to fetch Mr. Crowbar from the car to see what was inside, but a ways further down the wall was the remains of another rolling garage door that was wasted. The West end of this room looked to have housed generators of some sort, most everything had been stripped. The East end once had a raised floor about 4' off the concrete. All of the flooring had been removed but there were still several institutional blue equipment racks bolted to the floor supports. There was access to a lower level but the ladder had been cut out. "Stretch" decided to take a look and climbed down in. It looked like it connected to the flooded section they had seen from the south side of the building, though he did notice a couple of dead rats floating in the water (total corpse count so far: 3) Once he clambered his way out we headed on to the next building. The second building was identical to the first except there were a few differences. For one the ladder to access the lower floor from the generator/equipment room had not been removed. For some reason there were THOUSANDS of nails all over the floor of the missile pen. The ladder from the west end of the room had been cut down and thrown into the exhaust hole. There was also a ladder leading to the roof outside one the west end. Sub-Commander Big E took a look up there, again, not a whole lot. The other main difference, maybe the first building we saw had them but we didn't see them was the HUNDREDS of wasp's nests in the corner between the walls and the ceiling. I'm glad we went when it was cold or we could've been horribly stung. We took a smoke break in the equipment room. Noises overhead startled us until we realized we'd disturbed some pigeons. While we were heading outside we heard a weird noise...Figured it was a cow. A quick look with the super light showed it was a BUNCH of cows. They didn't sound too happy to see us. We decided to skip the third building we now knew was another missile pen and headed over to the command building. We noticed big depressions in the ground that could have been tunnels leading to each of the pens from the command center. We weren't able to find any access to them though. Our first peek into the building was what appeared to be the central command room, dozens of institutional blue equipment racks, looks like someone had played dominos with them. All the stairs that led down into the room (about 4') had been cut out, we could see the whole thing so there was no point in clambering in. Now comes the tricky bit...I don't know how to describe these things we found outside the south end of the building and we didn't get any good pictures. They were about 12' in diameter and about 4' tall, white and made of wood. They were round and all around the base we could see little flip up doors about 8" high. We flipped one up and looked inside. There was glass in a pane under the door and a dirt floor. We figure they must have been some kind of observation dome that had been removed from the roof of the building. Strange. On the West side of the building there was a trench about 4' deep that ran the length of the building, a door led into what must have been a couple of antenna stacks, At the base they were about 10' in diameter, conical and about 12' high with a ladder leading up, they were stripped, but I'm guessing they housed big honkin radar dishes. A door from here also led into the main room. Another door on the west side led into a couple of offices and a stairwell that led down, I went around the North side of the building with "Stretch" and found an external stairway that led to the downstairs. Big E and Borland were down there, we could see there lights, they were looking at something at the bottom of the stairs. A lovely dead cow. It must have been there a long time because there wasn't much left. We didn't disturb it at all but we did wonder how it ended up in there. Either it fell in and hurt itself. Wandered down the stairs and was too stupid to walk back up. Someone may have pushed it in (there was signs that this was a big party hangout) or Rancher Bob had decided it was easier to dump the cow corpse there than anywhere else. It remains a mystery. Downstairs was pretty boring, little rooms, lots of wire bits, a couple holes in the floor that had some lovely "water" in them. Someone had used the elevator shaft as a place to dump barbed wire. The pile in the shaft was 8-12' deep and filled the whole shaft. Now consider how nasty it would be to fall down the shaft from the top floor, go down about 6 feet to land in a giant pile of rusty barbed wire. Man that would suck. We snapped a quick group photo. There was one more structure that looked worth looking at, we hiked over to it. It was probably once a vehicle maintenance shed. All the metal sheeting used for the walls had been removed so it was just a skeleton. Not too much to look at here either. We decided to head back. On the walk back to the car I looked up. The stars were AMAZING, cloudless cold night; you could see the milky way. I know I rag on Wyoming a lot but that was a beautiful sky. It felt like it must have been 2 or 3 in the morning. I asked what the time was... 6:00pm. We were all amazed; we'd only been on the site for about an hour. We're used to doing this kind of thing in the middle of the night so it was a bit of a shock. On the way out we decided to pull the gate closed so livestock wouldn't wander out. Agent Borland gave me a hand hooking it back up and we decided the "shotgun" war had been going on too long and that "Stretch" did not deserve the front seat any longer. His death grip on the jesus handle kept us from being able to drag him from the front seat. We piled in and headed home. On the way back we stopped at the Cheyenne VI - Everyone ordered chicken fried steak. I was going to, but 4 guys ordering the same thing is a little creepy so I opted for the patty melt. Semi raw fries that needed another dip in the oil, about a gallon of Dr Pepper and we were on the way home. |