After cracking Millbrook Prison with some of Toronto’s finest explorers, I went in search of a new point of view on the concrete canyons I’d been exploring at ground level for the last week. Joined by Jono and Dresden, we set our sights on the modestly tall CF Tower – a 36 floor monolith of steel and glass right smack in the middle of Toronto on Queen Street East. Past the security desk and into the elevators went the three of us, and a short vertical ride later, we were facing down the last door between us and the sky. Jono turned the handle, the catch drew back unhindered by a lock, and the magic portal was opened.

Three of Toronto’s tallest buildings keep watch over the city; from l-r, Scotia Plaza (902 ft/275m), Bay Adelaide West (715 ft/218m), and First Canadian Place (978 ft/298m). To the right of the downtown core is the CN Tower, dwarfing the skyscrapers at more than 1800 ft (550m) high.

From up here, perspective definitely changes. Aside from the sheer height (for reference, 465.88 ft/142m), turning all the pedestrians and streetcars below into pawns on a child’s play set, there exists up here a strange kind of solitude. Toronto at ground level is a busy, sometimes frenetic environment; people rushing everywhere with something to do, drivers cutting off each other in attempts to make green lights, the sound of streetcars clanking down Queen East, music, everything. However, at this moment, on this rooftop, there were only the three of us, and for all we cared we could be the only people in the city. The only sounds up here were the occasional *whirrrrrr* from the elevator machinery nearby, the muffled, reverberating soundtrack to the city below, and the rush of the wind coming off the lake, intensified by our present altitude. The roof was a fantastic perch, ringed by a small rail system used to carry the equipment needed to lower the window washers on their rounds. This ring of metal, as luck would have it, made an excellent place to anchor tripods.

Downtown Toronto was just starting to empty its buildings of cubicle dwellers, so the three of us decided to slip out among them, saying goodbye before heading off to catch subways and streetcars destined for far-flung parts of the city. Later that evening, Dresden and I headed for the legendary King Edward Hotel to meet up with Hilite and pay a visit to not only the long-abandoned 17th floor ballroom, but the summit of the building itself. The King Eddy, which opened in 1903, is one of Toronto’s oldest and most well-heeled hotels. We dressed up for the occasion, my pea coat and D’s leather gloves and classy scarf passing the rich test given to us by the eyes of the front desk concierge as we walked in. We proceeded up the elevator, down a hallway to an out-of-the-way stairwell, and up another flight of stairs until we found an unlocked door to the vaunted 17th floor. We were in.

The King Eddy’s Crystal Ballroom was last used in 1978.

Dresden gets up close and personal with Toronto.

Farther up the magical staircase, another unlocked door led us to the room housing the hotel’s six humming elevator motors. Yet another door, again mysteriously unlocked (I don’t know why, but Canadians rarely lock their roofs), let us out into the chilly, cloudless night. From up here, the sleepy city still buzzed, illuminated from all sides by thousands of lights. The view from up here was simply staggering.

Couldn’t resist a little self-portraiture.

Dresden and Hilite make their way back down the magic stairwell.

After paying a visit to the Eddy, we made tracks to a pho restaurant just inside the Kensington Market neighbourhood. Out came big bowls of steaming broth, noodles and meat, and over these tasty midnight munchies we traded war stories, reminisced about long-demolished sites, and talked shop (all of us having some photographic pursuits). Toronto is known as the cradle of organized urban exploration, and the explorers who call this city their home are always knowledgeable about what’s under the surface of their glittering metropolis. Hilite was no exception; calm, well-spoken, and with his finger on the pulse of the city, intent on getting to the bottom (or the top) of whatever urban mission he set himself on. Our conversation was laced with names like Consumers’ Glass, the Royal Constellation, and the legendary Malt. Some of these places would see visits before my departure from Canada, but which to choose? Our bowls now dry of soup, Dresden and I said our goodbyes to our comrade and headed off to the subway again, retreating to the dark reaches off of Bloor Street to make our plans for the next night.

As we peered down the incline, the space below us opened up into the workings of a full-sized underground ore mill, a complex of huge machines used to crush big hunks of ore-bearing rock down to smaller and smaller pieces for transport and further processing. The miners dug out a cavern more than eight stories high in places, housing not only the huge rock crushers themselves, but more workspaces, a few company offices, and a conveyor system which fed the hungry workings of the various machines involved in the milling process. At peak output, an incredible 150-200 tons of ore could be processed in each 8-hour shift. This was Belden’s heart; the place where the huge machines that did the dirty business of milling the ore lived. Our voices bounced off the high walls and huge, silent machines, our breath hanging in the air, visible for seconds at a time after we exhaled before clinging to flat surfaces as shimmery drops of condensation. Years ago, this room would have been deafeningly loud with the sounds of mineral extraction: metal smashing rock, the hum of generators and engines, the shouting of the foremen as the carts crawled up and down the incline. Many of the slowly rusting ladders and stairs didn’t even creak after years in the mountain – a testament to the skill of the men who dug this manmade cave out of the hard granite of western Colorado.

The long steel rods inside the crushers would roll around as they turned, smashing the pieces of siderite, sphalerite, and pyrite (among other other minerals) into bits to be transported elsewhere.

A view looking back up at the incline from the crusher level.

An elevator in the upper level of the crusher room moved people and equipment between the crusher and shop levels. If it were operational, it would take us down to a tunnel leading out to the rail siding in the canyon.

It was almost time for us to head for the exit, as we’d be losing light in the canyon soon. Our exit from Belden took a different route than our entrance, and as we moved through the tunnels to the surface, the mill proved there were still surprises around the corner. A plastic tarp, ostensibly put there by the EPA during their cleanup, blocked off a side tunnel. We investigated, and found that the room held something straight out of a video game: a cavern with electric lime green runoff beneath the makeshift floorboards. Once the room was confirmed to be mutant- and zombie-free, we moved in.

Further back, we found a wooden catwalk which gave claustrophobic access to the top of a large holding tank. It seemed we had stumbled onto one of the EPA’s mine water storage locations, part of their plan to clean up the Eagle Mine site. The idea here is that water in the tanks is to be drained and treated in a newly built water treatment plant near Bolts Lake, a few miles up the river. The unearthly shade of green may be a combination of antifreeze (added to the runoff water to keep it liquid during the frigid winter months) and copper leaching, but regardless of its chemical content, we decided the best course of action would be to continue out of the mountain and away from the neon green liquid. Tripods and cameras were packed and accounted for, and off we went.

Eventually, one of the tunnels showed light at the end, and the four of us opened a rusty, creaky door and broke out of the depths and into the warm Colorado sunshine. Our exit let us out of Battle Mountain at an interesting place: about a third of the way up the canyon wall, right above a long, steep slope strewn with sharp, broken rocks of all sizes. Not the easiest place to descend from, but it definitely made for a great view of the exterior of the subterranean giant we had just slain.

Our descent began, the four of us slowly making our way down the scree to the floor of the canyon below. An old steel cable, perhaps once used to move ore or power around the site, now made a makeshift fixed rope to steady us as we tried to keep our footing on the loose, constantly shifting mass of rocks. Before long, the team was once again on ground level. As the sun continued its arc towards the tops of the peaks hemming us in, we investigated some of the above ground buildings in the complex. A small power substation near Darwin’s Ladder once supplied the mine and mill with power enough to keep the machines inside running and the miles of lights on. It was from here that the fateful switch was thrown, plunging the underground into the darkness when the EPA finally pulled the plug.

These transformers, once filled with toxic PCBs, were emptied ahead of the EPA’s arrival by a Union Pacific Railroad subsidiary. UP owns the now-abandoned Tennessee Pass line which runs past Belden.

Our hike out began soon after, the four of us heading back down the tracks toward Red Cliff. The Tennessee Pass line that our boots now traversed was once the highest railroad mainline in America. Built in the late 1800s by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway to beat the competing Colorado Midland to the mineral riches of the Leadville and Gilman districts, this line was for many years the primary transcontinental route through the Colorado Rockies. Southern Pacific bought the D&RGW in 1988, routing their huge 100-car coal trains up the line, some with as many as ten locomotives shoving them up the steep grades to the top of the pass. Eventually, Union Pacific bought out Southern Pacific, and with UP’s ownership of the Moffat Tunnel and other routes through the Rockies farther north in Wyoming, this legendary route was shut down for good in 1997. Only the section through the Royal Gorge remains open as an excursion line.

Digital_me takes point as the team heads for the Red Cliff Bridge, which carries U.S. Highway 24 over the Eagle River. The new water treatment plant, built to clean up water from the mine, is nearby.

We arrived back at the car exhausted, but elated with the accomplishments of the preceding 48 hours. Only time will tell what becomes of Belden; recent work has been centered on stabilization and environmental monitoring. Unlike the town above it, redevelopment is not in the cards for Belden (after all, there’s only so many things one can use a giant, contaminated underground mill for) so for now, only the slow, unyielding forces of decay will continue to work inside Battle Mountain.

_{«Many thanks go to the Denver Public Library’s Western History Department for providing invaluable information on the history and underground workings of Belden.»}

We awoke in our hobo hostel room in downtown Gilman, Colorado to a warm autumn morning, the town around us silent except for the chirping of birds and the occasional truck passing on the highway nearby. Our mission today was twofold: reposition our vehicle for an easier pickup, and descend into the canyon below the town in search of access to Belden – the immense underground ore mill deep inside the bowels of Battle Mountain.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.

As the Eagle Mine began to mature, the owners found that the small mill operating on the banks of the Eagle River was simply out of its element. As they sought to increase the capacity of the mill, they quickly found themselves running out of space in the narrow confines of the canyon. The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway’s critical Tennessee Pass route took up a premium amount of this limited space, running on both sides of the canyon at points to make good use of the available real estate. Along with the twin track siding near the mine, various outbuildings and coal/oil/water supplies for the locomotives quickly put a squeeze on the milling operation. To the New Jersey Zinc Company, there was only one thing to do: go underground. Lower parts of the mine that had been exhausted were enlarged into cavernous rooms, some twenty feet high and nearly a hundred feet from end to end. Miles of labyrinthine connecting tunnels were dug to move the incoming ore around the mill levels of the complex. Massive rock crushers were moved into the spaces piece by piece and assembled in their new homes. The mine and mill soon ratcheted up production until it peaked in the late 1950s at nearly 4500 tons of ore every month – some silver and gold but mostly zinc, used primarily in galvanizing steel against corrosion. By some accounts, Belden became the largest underground milling operation in the world by the early 60s.

Belden’s exterior buildings in the early 1910s. A string of ore cars waits at the siding for loading and transport to NJZ’s Cañon City smelter. (Colorado School of Mines/Heritage West)

The mine’s success was soon overshadowed by trouble on the horizon. Increasing labour problems, falling prices for ores as production began to shift overseas, and the use of plastics in more and more things all started to push the operation at Belden towards the edge. Several mine shutdowns occurred in later years, the on-and-off employment prospects slowly driving away the miners who had once called the town above home. By the time 1980 rolled around, only a skeleton crew was left in the mine, keeping the lights on and the mine dry just in case full scale production ever returned. It never did.

When the mine shut down in 1984, the US Environmental Protection Agency took custody of the site. They pledged to work with the mine’s then-owners, the Viacom Corporation (through their Gulf+Western subsidiary) to clean up from more than a century of mining in the area. Their solution was to plug and flood the mine itself using huge bulkheads buried deep inside the former mill level. The groundwater seeping into the mine would slowly be drained and treated in a new processing plant built near Red Cliff. After pulling the last PCB-filled transformer out of the slowly flooding mine, the last team in simply turned out the lights and left. The end had finally come for the Eagle.

Digital_me and I hiked out of Gilman to reposition the car and resupply the group with fine Colorado ales; orogeny and shotgun mario would descend to the canyon via the rickety remains of an ore tramway still somehow attached to the side of the mountain. This was one way of getting ore from the mine to wherever it needed to go, but in its decaying state, the tramway is known as ‘Darwin’s Ladder’ – the difficulty of traversing it tends to weed out those who are unqualified (to put it nicely). Our team was well up to the task, however, and by the time digital_me and myself were hiking up the now-dormant rail line into the canyon, our other half was already having lunch on the banks of the Eagle River.

Darwin’s Ladder as seen from the canyon. It’s best to be careful on the way down.

Tailings from the mine that still dangle precariously over the river near Belden were shored up a few years ago, preventing the rotting, century-old retaining logs from giving way and dumping thousands of tons of waste into the river. The Eagle River in particular was affected by Gilman and its mine; fish kills were reported first in the 1950s, then more often as the years progressed. These days, the river is prime territory for anglers fishing the renewed populations of trout and kayakers looking to shoot the Class IV rapids not far from the mine.

That afternoon, our adventures were elsewhere, and onward we pressed, probing the mountain for entry to the secret world within. Finally, we found ourselves an entrance, a wonderful hole in the side of the mountain that led us into a strange subterranean world. On went our hard hats and headlamps, tripods were unpacked, and with our 0² meter making no scary noises, we took our first steps into the depths of Battle Mountain.

The innards of the mountain are made up of miles upon miles of mazelike tunnels, some of which flood from time to time due to changes in seepage and water infiltration. Thankfully, today, the water had receded, leaving in its wake a floor thick with inches of sticky, bright yellow mine goop. This goop contains all sorts of wonderfulness, mostly garden variety mine waste but laden with heavy metals, solvents, and no doubt many other questionable substances. We were in a very foreign place; cavelike, but with the natural wonder of rock formations replaced by the remnants of a long-abandoned industrial powerhouse. The myriad pipes and conduits that once carried the stuff of life to the miners below the surface – air, power, and water – now rusted away, some still managing to cling to the still-solid rock walls of the tunnels.

As we moved through the tunnels, we found all sorts of remnants from the mine’s operational days. The mine and mill had 24″ gauge tracks laid throughout it for mine carts, and though many left the mine to be turned into scrap, many still remain inside. As we approached the ore storage pocket (a part of the mine where crushed ore was dumped from the trains coming from the mill), we came across a curious looking addition to a derelict train. Several cars in the train had closed tops with holes in them, which made them unsuitable for carrying ore. As luck would have it, we had stumbled upon what was known to the miners as a ‘honey wagon’ – basically a portable toilet. The toilet cars would be attached to the end of a string of ore cars going into the mine, allowing the miners to relieve themselves without having to go all the way out of the mine. This honey wagon ended up near the ore pocket’s 100 foot deep shaft, a giant hopper which ended in a loading room where larger mine trains would carry ore out of the mine and onto the waiting railroad cars. We elected to tread lightly across the chasm.

Orogeny lights up a train of mine carts waiting before the ore pocket in Belden’s upper levels.

Further on, we found a collection of machine shops and work spaces for the mine and mill. Under the surface, it was easy to lose the scale of the size of the complex we were in. Larger corridors led to huge dug-out caverns partitioned off by walls, some reaching up into three floors in height. These rooms were used to do everything from maintaining the miniature locomotives pulling the carts through the mine to keeping the miners’ rock drills sharp. The larger ones were outfitted with heavy lifting equipment in case repairs needed to be effected on one of the huge machines elsewhere in the depths of the mill. So much of the equipment was simply left in place that if it weren’t for the decades of decay that inevitably result from being inside a dark, leaky mountain, it could be as if the lights were turned out yesterday. As for our lighting equipment, there was no such thing as too much. The lack of power meant cave darkness inside Belden – a terrifying prospect if our lights gave out. This meant backups aplenty: headlamps, fluorescent lanterns, the ubiquitous Mag-Lite, compact LED lights, even a few glow sticks and road flares just in case.

This clock records the time that power was cut off to the mill. Interestingly, the calendar mounted on the solid rock wall reads 1970, more than ten years before the final closing of the mine.

This jar of mysterious deep red goo is lit from behind by a blue LED. Our best guess is transmission or hydraulic fluid, though superhero-spawning mutation properties are not out of the question.

Some unknown underground mold has taken over this chair in an upper level workshop. Airflow is still adequate in the mill, though recent work has sealed many of the shafts and adits that previously allowed fresh air (and thus potentially outside agents like mold spores) inside.

This two-story machine shop room (illuminated with the help of Akron on a previous trip) allowed heavy maintenance to be done on large, bulky mine equipment without actually having to remove the equipment from the underground workings.

One tunnel led us to the top of a long slope extending far down into Battle Mountain. The nearby structure and rail junction (complete with an abandoned locomotive) gave clues to this ramp’s purpose: this was the South Incline, a long stretch of tunnel that was critical to the transport of ore within the mill. The shack at the top held a huge winch that was used to move the ore carts up or down to either end of the incline, where they would be hitched to waiting mine locomotives to move them along to their next stop. This incline was no ordinary tunnel, however, as we were about to find out.

The mine carts were shunted around in this small yard at the top of the South Incline for transport to other parts of Belden’s upper levels.

A look down the incline gives a tantalizing look at an underground space of mammoth size. A head-mounted red LED should help with scale.

Stay tuned for Part Two, which promises even more underground goodness. In the mean time, check out the photo set right here.

When one hears the words ‘ghost town’, the first image to come to mind is usually a small collection of log cabins high in the mountains, perhaps clustered around a rickety old wooden mine headframe; maybe a crumbling stone old-West-style jail house. Gilman takes those stereotypes and throws them completely out the window. The sheer size of the town is staggering to those accustomed to exploring abandoned structures. More than 60 extant buildings remain in the town, many of them in remarkable shape.

Last year, I went with Denver urbex regulars orogeny and digital_me along with shotgun mario from MSP – a representative of the Twin Cities’ legendary Strategic Beer Command. The trick with Gilman is knowing where to stash your ride – too close, and the ever vigilant Colorado Highway Patrol will catch you, too far, and the hike in will take more time than it’s worth. We compromise. Our car was carefully hidden, locked up and left for the night, and we started the hike to the town.

Main Street was the center of everyday life in Gilman. The New Jersey Zinc offices, as well as a general store, boarding house, and the town’s prized bowling alley were all here. From the moment you arrive, the sheer size of the town makes the atmosphere a bit spooky. This is the original nucleus of the town, the part that burnt to ashes back in 1900. The town’s boarding house may have been built on the site of the Iron Mask Hotel, which survived the fire only to be demolished later. During the town’s working days, this building was home to miners who didn’t have anywhere else to stay; rookies, transients, bachelors who needed the cheap rent. It was dorm-style living, with a bathroom at the end of the hallway, communal kitchen, and one hell of a view. We found ourselves a room in the newly christened Gilman Mountain Hostel and dropped our gear.

At the far end of Main Street, just down the slope, there is a nondescript two-story concrete building. This was the science lab for the mine, fully equipped for testing whatever ore samples the miners brought up. The upper floor is set up much like a high school chemistry classroom, but with broken beakers and test tubes littering the floor and rusted gas pipes winding their way through the fixtures like decaying metal serpents. The most striking thing about this building, however, was the masses of X-rays littering the entire lower floor. The miners were required to get regular X-rays to check for things like abnormalities in their lungs (most of the negatives on the floor are miners’ chests), and now after 27 years, the thousands upon thousands of negatives lay strewn all over the floor.

Back up the street is the town’s club house and bowling alley. This was a showpiece for the town, the place that the miners, their families, and residents from nearby communities could come to enjoy themselves. The alley had two lanes, each operated by hand – in its latter days it was one of the few in the state to still use pin boys. At one time, Gilman boasted mens’ and womens’ leagues that went all over the state racking up trophies. A feature in the 15 June 1975 edition of the Rocky Mountain News had this to say:

The clubhouse has meeting rooms, the town library, a ping pong table, a runty basketball court with two baskets that are hardly visible because of ceiling beams and pipes plus a bowling alley.

Gilman’s two-lane bowling facility is the last of its kind in Colorado. Pins are set by pin boys, the ball return mechanism is antique and a chalk stand is located on the approach. A telescore table and screen help remind bowlers they are living in the age of technology.”
- Rocky Mountain News, 15 June 1975

These days the lanes are quiet, the basketball court replaced by a MacGyvered skatepark made by some local kids. The chalk scoreboard still remains, though, and now serves as the guestbook for the town. I have a neat row of dates on the right side – nine? Ten? I’ve lost count.

We headed next for the shaft house, a fairly conspicuous building closer to the highway which was the epicenter for mining in the town. The shaft house lies on the edge of what we refer to as the far side of the town – much more exposure, less cover to use. This is the part of Gilman that greets you as you round the curve on Highway 24, the ghost town’s most public face. Also, the only access lies down a steep, heavily forested hill which (it being autumn) was already mostly devoid of foliage. Anyone on the highway could easily pick out four figures running (hopefully not falling) down the hill to the safety of the shaft house. However sometimes, as ds puts it, you just have to roll the dice and run for it.

The Eagle’s main lifts took only three minutes to drop the miners four hundred feet straight down into the darkness to what was known as ’16 Level’ – the centre of the mine, though by no means its deepest point. The lifts were winched up and down by huge motors that pulled the cable over a massive pulley in the top of the shaft house. These lifts have been locked at the top level since the last day of the mine, held by a few inches of steel above what may as well be the bottomless pit.

The shaft house also held locker rooms, showers, and everything else the miners would need to do their jobs. Boxes of respirators and hard hats, bags of cement – even a forklift remain where they were left after the last workers turned off the lights and walked away. The intervening years have not been kind to parts of the structure, and a partial roof collapse has turned the attached locker room into something straight from a B-grade slasher movie.

Today, the mine itself is sealed and flooded, filled with water by the Environmental Protection Agency as part of their cleanup of the complex. The site was added to the Superfund list of heavily contaminated properties almost as soon as it was closed. This is much of the reason that the town remains off-limits; the soil has higher-than-acceptable concentrations of heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and cadmium. I wouldn’t lick the rocks.

Farther down the slope, a few rows of nearly intact houses beckoned. Because of the steepness of the terrain, they are arranged in terrace-like rows, still stubbornly clinging to the side of the mountain after 27 years of neglect. This sprint was steeper and much longer than the first, and consisted mostly of fist- to grapefruit-sized hunks of sharp rock. We took the dice in hand once again, waited for our move, and rolled ‘em. Down the slope we went.

These houses are almost as they were when their owners walked away almost thirty years ago. While the elements have taken an inevitable toll on them, their remoteness and visibility means that they have been largely passed up by the vandals and scrappers that have ravaged the rest of the town. No graffiti, unsmashed toilets and sinks, even intact windows – unheard of on Main Street. These houses would have been owned by the higher-ups at the mine: superintendents, foremen, company bosses and the like.

We regrouped back up at the shaft house, having nearly been sighted charging back up the hill from the houses below. Our light was fading fast, the sun already approaching the tops of the massive peaks that surrounded us. It was time for us to go the hobo way and return to our impromptu hostel for the night. As the sun set, we cracked a few beers and waited for the innumerable stars of the Rocky Mountain night to appear. Tomorrow, we would descend to the canyon floor in search of entry to the world’s largest underground mill – Belden. Stay tuned.

For more photographs of Gilman, click here.

High in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado is a small town clustered around one of the largest zinc mines in America. You see it first coming around a bend on Highway 24, houses and buildings clinging precariously to the side of Battle Mountain. The road to the town is gated, padlocked shut to passersby on the highway. As they get closer, the buildings below start to look different: the windows are shattered, the paint on the outsides peeling, the streets they line overgrown. This is the town of Gilman, and it’s been vacant since 1984.

In 1887, a mining speculator from the nearby town of Red Cliff named John Clinton set up a camp around the Iron Mask Mine and several others on the flanks of Battle Mountain. This camp, appropriately called Clinton in its infancy, was soon renamed Gilman after the well-liked superintendent of the Iron Mask, Henry Gilman. By the turn of the century, the collection of mines at Gilman (including the Ben Butler, the Iron Mask, and five or six other smaller shafts) were sending out gold, silver, and lead ores via the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway’s famed Tennessee Pass route, which reached up the gorge in 1882.

The town nearly didn’t make it past the turn of the century. In the wee hours of 1 August 1900, Gilman was reduced mostly to cinders in a fire that claimed nearly every structure on the mountain. That day’s Rocky Mountain News tells the story:

“The town of Gilman, of 600 inhabitants and the center of the mining industry in Eagle County, was wiped out of existence at 2 o’clock this morning. The fire originated in the Lacknor residence from causes unknown, and owing to the unusually long dry spell and high wind was soon beyond the control of the fire department of miners that was quickly organized. This morning with the exception of the Iron Mask Hotel, little of the mining camp is left…no lives were lost, and only three or four persons were scorched.”
- Rocky Mountain News, 1 August 1900

In the years following, the town rebuilt itself, eventually boasting everything a small mountain town could want; a hotel, a small hospital, post office, even a two-lane bowling alley that was the only place for leagues between Leadville and Glenwood Springs. 1912 saw the arrival of the New Jersey Zinc Company and the consolidation of the remaining mines in the area into one: the Eagle. The company’s arrival heralded a new era for the town; it had always been a mining town, its purpose defined in the dirty faces and tired backs of the men who worked there, but now it took on another name: company town. New Jersey Zinc opened up a general store on Main Street, pumped money into a municipal water system, and kept the mine in the black. As the miners worked deeper into the gut of Battle Mountain, they found that the sulfite ores they were mining (mostly sphalerite and siderite for geology nerds) contained high enough levels of zinc that the smelters simply refused to buy it. Gradually this problem became an asset after the installment of new equipment to extract the zinc; it was useful for coating steel to make it resistant to corrosion, and aside from a stretch in the 1930s when copper/silver ores briefly became the mainstay again, zinc was king at the Eagle Mine. By the end of the 1950s more than 4500 tons of zinc ore were leaving the mine every month.

The 1950s saw the beginnings of signs of trouble in Gilman. A strike over pay in 1954 pitted the unionized miners against the non-union surface workers and bosses, and opened wounds across the picket line that would never heal. For two weeks, the Eagle was worked by a skeleton crew of surface workers and hired NJZ scabs from out of state. Eventually, the union came to an agreement to resume work, but even then, the battle lines between the miners and the surface workers remained until the mine finally closed for good.

1957 saw the first closure of the Eagle Mine, as falling zinc prices forced New Jersey Zinc to suspend work at the mine until more favorable economics prevailed. Though the price of zinc once again rose enough to keep Gilman alive, the influx of cheap foreign minerals and the substitution of plastics for many of the roles zinc was used for (ie: cars) caused the New Jersey Zinc Company to shut down the Eagle mine for good in 1978. The company gave the 154 workers still living in Gilman only two weeks to pack up and wait for word on new assignments. Some found new mines, some headed for the burgeoning ski industry in the Vail Valley. A Rocky Mountain News two-part feature on the closing interviewed two miners who found work as janitors at Minturn Middle School. Others simply packed up and left, heading off to try to find themselves and their families a new life after spending years underground. State assistance grants were debated, but little help beyond unemployment checks ever found the miners and their families.

A skeleton crew clung on for another seven years, maintaining the complex workings within the mountain and doing exploratory drilling in case the mine were ever reopened. It wasn’t. The end finally came in the early 1980s. The owner at the time, Cañon City businessman Glenn Miller, had been trying to find enough money to keep the mine open, but his backers fell through. Eviction notices began going out to the remaining residents in 1981, whittling down the remaining workforce in Gilman to only six men in the final days of the mine. In June of 1984, the US Environmental Protection Agency took over the mine’s electric bill – which totaled almost $60000 in back services – until the final three electrical transformers in the mine (which contained extremely toxic PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls) could be removed and made inert. After they were pulled, the final miners simply turned off the lights and walked out. The Eagle Mine, once the largest producer of zinc in the country, was now silent. Gilman was gated off, the last residents evicted soon after.

Today, the town still holds clues as to the people that once called it home. The decaying company offices on Main Street are strewn with papers left behind when the mine closed; inventory sheets, order forms, time sheets, even employee records. These records help tell the story of the miners who worked the Eagle. Take, for instance, Jose Nemicio Martinez, who applied to work for New Jersey Zinc on 29 November 1945 at the age of 42.

Mr. Martinez was an American, born in San Juan Pueblo, a small town in northern New Mexico. In fact, many of the miners at Gilman came from New Mexico; the company’s log books are full of names like Sena, Lopez, and Chacon; places like Rancho de Taos and Truchas. Martinez had worked on his family’s farm in San Juan Pueblo until the start of World War II, when he entered the service of the US government as a worker at Alameda Naval Air Station in California. After the war, he came to the rugged mountains of Colorado to find work. He was a shoveler at the Eagle, making $.89 a day to heave ore from mountain to cart, or cart to mill, or wherever else it needed to go. Martinez lived as many miners did in nearby Red Cliff, making the trip up the road to the mine every day. He had a wife, Esequela, and two children; Pedro and Rosalie, all of whom continued to live in San Juan Pueblo. It’s easy to imagine Martinez sending what he could of his wages back home to his family from Colorado until his brief time in the mines was cut short. Martinez’ pink slip lists ‘Mother sick’ as his reason for leaving – records indicate he returned to San Juan Pueblo at the beginning of 1946.

The town is officially off-limits today, owned by a real estate investment group from Canada who are waiting for the economy to become more favorable for Gilman’s redevelopment. Its fate has become a local political issue. Long story short: the previous owner, a developer by the name of Bobby Ginn, purchased the site with the intent of building a private, exclusive, VIP ski resort and getaway. This was to be no Crested Butte or even Aspen; lift tickets here would start in the six-figure range and come complete with your own luxury condo, private transport, perhaps even an on-call helo to whisk your incredibly wealthy self to the tops of the nearby peaks for fresh powder. A championship-grade golf course would sprawl out on the valley floor, and at the center of the resort, an opulent hotel and residences complex that some have likened (in blueprints) to an Austrian castle.

In order to develop the site (due to zoning laws), he coaxed the nearby town of Minturn into annexing Gilman – by offering the small town what amounted to $180m (144 times Minturn’s annual budget) in assorted benefits: $50 season passes to his hypothetical luxury haven, new sidewalks, a new water treatment plant, scholarships for local kids, et cetera. Minturn agreed; after all, if they had refused Ginn’s offer, he could have simply gone up the road to Red Cliff and offered them the deal, leaving Minturn out in the cold. As all of this was coming together, however, the economy tanked and suddenly the market for incredibly expensive ski retreats dried up. Ginn’s venture went into receivership, after which the current owners purchased the property. There were other problems too; the town’s soil still needed remediation, the sheer size of the site meant that demolition would be a pricey endeavour, and unfortunately for prospective developers, the town sits on a mountain that has so many tunnels and shafts in it that it more closely resembles an anthill than a ski resort. Heavy equipment would be dangerous to operate, with sinkholes already appearing in the town due to subsidence.

Regardless of the eventual fate of Gilman, it remains an important part of Colorado history as one of the largest mining operations ever undertaken in the state. Its ores found their way to smelters and refiners all over the country – including the now-abandoned Globe smelter which gave Denver’s Globeville neighbourhood its name. For us, it is a place to respect, to explore, to document. Though the town is officially a no-man’s-land, as is so often the case in exploring the off-limits, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Stay tuned for part two.

The crew entrance to Titan 725B in the middle of nowhere, Colorado.

What they came up with around 1955 was a twofold program. The SM-65 Atlas missile, which was lighter (its skin was no thicker than a US dime or UK 5p coin) and had less payload, and the appropriately named (if confusingly designated) HGM-25A Titan I missile. The Titan was built to be the Atlas’ big brother. Bigger warhead, more range, hardened shelters (ie: underground silos).

Layout of a typical Titan I complex. The silos were built to a cartoonishly big, evil-villain-hideout scale, with three silos and over a mile of connecting tunnels. (USAF)

Each had a two stage liquid fuelled rocket with a range of 5,500 nautical miles (10,200 km); enough to get to the heart of Mother Russia. The propellants, cryogenic liquid oxygen and RP-1 (which is basically super-refined kerosene), were tough to handle, since they ignited on contact, but packed a wallop. The first test facility at Vandenburg AFB was destroyed when its missile was lowered into its silo too quickly – rupturing its skin and allowing the propellants to mix. The result was a blast which threw the silo cap hundreds of feet into the air – in several multi-ton pieces. Ouch.

These missiles were deployed for the first time to silos at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado in early 1960. Through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Titans at Lowry stood on launch alert 24 hours a day – ready to send the 4 megatons of apocalyptic fire attached to each missile straight to Havana, or Moscow, or practically anywhere else in the world President Kennedy wanted to send them.

The Titan I missiles at Lowry complex 724A stand at attention for the USAF brass in 1960. This was the ready position for the missiles, poised at the tops of their huge elevators. (USAF)

After they were closed down in 1965 – that’s right, just five years later – the land was sold to various farmers who did some salvage work, usually taking copper piping and the steel plate floors from their silos. In this case, Farmer Bob dug up one of the giant diesel tanks that held fuel for the complex’s generators. The resulting giant hole in the ground gave us an access point that is found in no other Titan site – a maintenance corridor to the second floor of the power dome, a giant 60-foot-tall room that held the generators for the complex.

One warm May night, we ventured out into the moonlit Eastern plains of Colorado to explore this relic of the Cold War. The team that night consisted of myself, tunnelbug from California, secretdestroyers from Pittsburgh, and locals lexiphoto and orogeny. We parked our jeep a mile from the site and began the long walk back in.

After finding our entrance, we emerged from the maintenance corridor and descended the steep stairway from the second level to the first of the powerhouse. Condensation drops clung to every surface, giving off an unearthly shimmer wherever the light from our headlamps touched them. The scale was immense. We stood in a room 60 feet high by 160 feet across, 40 feet underground in the middle of Farmer Bob’s field.

The 60-foot-high powerhouse of complex 725B. The ring around the top of the dome held a gantry crane used to move heavy machinery around in the limited space.

The complex smelled of all sorts of nastiness. These silos were laden with PCBs, asbestos, airbourne lead, diesel, and all manner of chemical solvents. Our respirators were quickly donned, and added yet one more layer of unearthliness to the expedition. We were visitors in a very alien place, one which few are privileged (or stupid) enough to see; a place that once held the power to end the world – literally.

These blast doors still moved without a squeak after 65 years underground.

The tunnels were damp, but passable. The steel plate floors of the complex had long since been scrapped, so we were reduced to walking on the dirt of the tunnel floor. Tunnel junctions were a different story, as they were dug deeper to accommodate the various fuel and electrical lines. 65 years later, they had become moats, and necessitated beam walking to conquer them.

Danarchy crosses a tunnel junction moat on Expedition 2. All forms of nastiness reside in the “water” beneath his feet.

The silos themselves loomed ahead. 160 feet from top to bottom, they originally held a complex latticework of steel that supported the giant rocket within it. The Titans did not burst from their silos on a pillar of flame like later ICBMs. The missiles were fuelled in their holes, and huge hydraulic rams would move the immense reinforced concrete doors covering the silo. After the doors were opened, the missiles would be hoisted up to the surface on a massive elevator attached to the cribbing, and launched. The whole process took 15 minutes for the first missile, and 7 minutes each for the last two. Only one could be armed and fired at a time. This lengthy procedure was one reason they went obsolete so quickly, the other being the liquid fuel. Liquid oxygen had to be kept at cryogenic temperatures requiring a lot of specialized equipment, and could not be stored in the missiles. By the time the Titans went on line, the next generation of solid-fuel ICBMs were already being designed. The Titan Is would soon be obsolete, replaced by the solid-fuelled Titan IIs, which remained in the USAF arsenal until 1987.

In here was the rocket itself, and at one time the massive cribwork containing it. (photo: tunnelbug)

What once held an unbelievable destructive force was now slowly filling with water. During the rainy season, or after the spring snowmelt, some of the silos fill almost to the tunnel level with water, then they drain through the myriad cracks in the concrete walls. Some enterprising silo owners have converted these to indoor SCUBA tanks, but this one was now a watery graveyard for whatever animal was unlucky enough to tumble into the darkness. We stood 40 feet under the surface, with 120 feet worth of tangled metal and water below. It was an awe-inspiring experience knowing that this place once held such a terrible power. Each Titan I missile carried a 4 megaton thermonuclear warhead – more than enough to turn Moscow or St. Petersburg into a glowing, radioactive mass. The Little Boy bomb that leveled Hiroshima was a mere firecracker at 15 kilotons. 1 megaton of explosive equivalent, when converted to commercial kilowatt-hours, produces enough energy to power the average American house for 103,474 years. And this complex housed not one, but three of these bastards. Walking with a big stick indeed.

The control center was our last stop, a two story structure similar in size to the power dome, but a bit smaller. Its panels and computers long since removed, the nerve center of the complex was now home to graffiti, dead snakes, and empty beer cans. What must have gone through the minds of the men charged with the duty of being ready to annihilate the world I can only imagine.

The entrance to the two-level control dome.

The photographers take their shots in the control center.

These racks held launch control computers and telephone equipment.

We emerged from the silo around 4am, exhausted and smelling like eighteen different kinds of chemicals, but with a new respect for the ground beneath our feet which holds a testament to the destructive power of men – and the sheer ridiculousness of the nuclear arms race. All those millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on holes in the ground which were only ‘useful’ for five years. Now this huge facility rusts in the ground, only giving up its secrets to those brave (or stupid) enough to enter.

More photos from inside the silo right here.

A merciless rain drenched the Long Island Railroad station at Kings Park, New York as E and myself sipped our corner store tea under an awning. The sun had long since set, and we still had twenty minutes of waiting in the downpour before the next train arrived to take us back to Brooklyn. The day had been long but successful, with patrols dodged and legendary buildings explored. My first attempt at a classic east coast asylum, and E’s first attempt at any urban exploring whatsoever had gone off without a hitch.

Kings Park Psychiatric Center is one of a string of huge mental institutions built on Long Island in the late 1800s along with Pilgrim State Hospital and Central Islip Psychiatric Center, as well as Edgewood State Hospital (built in the early ’40s).  For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these institutions held thousands of patients, sent there from the teeming asylums closer to New York City to live and work on ‘farm colonies’ – at first the Long Island asylums were just that.  Patients would tend fields and livestock, build furniture and sew their own clothing.  During the early to mid 19th century, the campus was mostly comprised of small, scattered cottage-style buildings spread out over several hundred acres of land adjoining Smithtown Bay. When the state of New York took over the campus in 1895, it was renamed the Kings County Branch Asylum. The surrounding area, known at the time as Saint Johnland, was renamed as well at the behest of local residents who did not want their town and its railroad station associated with the asylum, giving the area and future township its current name: Kings Park.

The cottages that originally comprised Kings Park. The goliath Building 93 would later be built on this site. (courtesy LIOddities)

It was believed that this simple lifestyle had a curative effect on the patients, though the asylum’s remote location was no doubt also a form of banishment for some. In time, Kings Park eventually grew to be its own self-sustaining city.  It had its own power station, telephone exchange, even its own spur line off of the Long Island Railroad so coal (and initially, patients until buses took over) could be brought in by rail.  By the 1950s, the KPPC campus covered a huge area of northern Suffolk county, with more than 150 buildings dotting the rolling landscape.  Instead of growing outward, the hospital began to build upward, with the iconic 13-story Building 93 reaching skyward in 1939.  Designed by New York’s state architect, William E. Haugaard, Building 93 was for many years the geriatric ward, treating and housing patients older than 55. Along with 93, there were dedicated patient ward buildings, a fully-equipped medical/surgical building, a police and fire station, even a boathouse on the Nissequogue River.

Unfortunately, the same gremlins that plagued the east coast asylums were present at KPPC.  Overcrowding, the very reason that KPPC had been built in the first place, became a chronic problem. By 1931, almost 5800 patients were living at Kings Park – while the facility was only made to hold 3700. The problem was not confined to Kings Park – at the system’s peak in 1950, New York’s asylums held more than 33,000 patients, most in the teeming facilities on Long Island. Stories of patient mistreatment, widespread abuse of electroshock therapy and even unnecessary prefrontal lobotomies abounded, many of them bearing truth.

The development of antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine in the 1960s was the nail in the coffin for Kings Park as well as the rest of the Long Island asylums. As drugs became more easily available, the asylums of the east coast began a process of ‘deinstitutionalization’ – in some cases transferring patients to facilities that were still open, like Pilgrim State farther down Long Island. Other patients were simply turned out on the streets, freshly inked prescriptions for drugs with names like Chlorpromazine or Haloperidol in hand. By the early 1990s, Kings Park Psychiatric Center (as it was now called) was only a shadow of its former self, with many of its hundreds of buildings already abandoned. Even Building 93 was not immune; it was slowly emptied of patients, its floors closed off one by one until, by 1990, only the first few were still occupied. In the fall of 1996, the state of New York transferred the last of the patients out, and the 111-year-old asylum was closed down and left to decay.

Earlier in the day, E and myself found our way by train from Brooklyn out to Long Island. The clouds in the distance menaced, but despite the weather we were determined to get into some mischief. The walk from the train station proved straightforward, and the two of us ventured up the road and into the massive campus. Most of the former hospital site was turned into the Nissequoge River State Park in 1996, so getting close to the buildings wasn’t difficult. Just over the ridge lay the first big edifice: Building 7, the medical building. E and I went around back to assess entry, but to our dismay, a pickup truck was waiting at the loading dock. Workers would be around, and getting in would be much harder with them nearby. We poked around for a moment, but no sooner had we tried a few doors than the 5-0 showed up.

Fortunately, they were friendly, and we chatted to the officers who approached us about the history surrounding the building we stood in front of. One of the deputies told us: “We see a lot of photographers out here, trying to get into the old buildings.” Funny how that works, I’ve no idea who’d do a thing like that. We, of course, promised to remain outside all the fences, and the cops headed off. We later saw the same two Suffolk County deputies we’d met hanging out on the roof of 7 – no doubt scoping out the KPPC campus from one of the best viewpoints around. As for us, we left the party and continued up the hill. We had business to attend to.

E checks a door at Building 23, the rec centre.

Brian Wasser

Building 93 is easily the most imposing of the extant buildings at KP. It towers over the campus with only the smokestack from the former power plant to challenge its rule. Though the building was surrounded by a fence that easily hit 15 feet, we had a mission. We pondered. We called our local contacts. We schemed. Eventually, we found a way through the fences and into the building, all the while keeping an eye out for the police we knew were now aware of our presence. We cracked 93, and the payoff was big.

The murals covering the walls of 93′s occupational therapy room are something of an enigma to this day. Though no one knows exactly who painted the figures on the wall, legend has it that a professional cartoonist was the creator. Percy Crosby, creator of the Skippy series of comics (yes, namesake of the peanut butter as well), was sent to Kings Park in January of 1949. He had been committed after an alleged suicide attempt following his mother’s death. At the recommendation of his uncle-in-law, Arthur Soper, Crosby was declared a paranoid schizophrenic by the state and confined to Kings Park indefinitely. Shady circumstances surrounded his confinement; for instance, the makers of Skippy peanut butter, Rosefield Packing Co., quickly trademarked the ‘Skippy’ name as their own, swearing under oath that no one else held claim to the name – certainly no one like Crosby, who at the time was still waiting for transfer to KPPC at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan after his suicide attempt only five days prior. Though he had been fighting Rosefield for years in court due to their use of the name, the peanut butter producers won out in the end. Crosby had been under audit by the IRS for tax purposes (an audit that some sources claim was politically motivated), and could not afford a legal fight from within the confines of the asylum.

In 1954, Rosefield sold the Skippy brand name to Corn Products Corporation (since renamed Best Foods Inc.) for $7.5 million (nearly $63m today).

Crosby died at Kings Park on 8 December 1964 from a heart attack. By virtue of his service in WWI, he was given a military burial at Pine Lawn Veterans Cemetery rather than in the asylum’s ‘potters field’ – where he would have been given a small grave marker with a number. It’s unknown as to whether he continued to work from the asylum; all incoming and outgoing mail was screened, so anything sent to publishers may have been lost before it ever left Kings Park. What he did leave behind, however, may be the mural covering the walls of the room E and myself found ourselves in. The sound of patients was long gone, their cries and murmurs now replaced by the sound of the rain outside and the occasional ‘shck-CHK’ of my shutter opening and closing.

The rain began to taper off briefly as we made good our escape from 93. As soon as it did, a low mist moved into take its place, giving the asylum an eerie air as we made our way back down Kings Park Boulevard to the train station. It seemed fitting, if slightly cliché. This place may have been a comfort for some, but for many it was no more than a prison, a place to be dreaded. Either way, Kings Park is a place with a certain character; its immensity is matched only by the emotional weight borne by the buildings. In the one hundred and twenty six years since its opening, Kings Park Psych had evolved from a collection of small cottages into a sprawling campus of more than a hundred buildings swarming with thousands of patients. It still remains to be seen what will become of the facility; various developers have made bids for the property (not counting the state park, owned by NY State), but nothing has materialized as of yet. For now, the asylum will continue to decay, visited only by the curious.

We hopped a local train to Rotterdam Centraal station and from there boarded the ‘woo hoo!!!’ express to Hoek van Holland. The huge port complex near the station held container and passenger ships from all over the world. Back in Prague I had booked us passage on Stena Line’s Stena Hollandica, running from the Europoort at the Hook of Holland across the North Sea to Harwich on the coast of England. From Harwich, a late-night train would take me back to Liverpool Street. The tickets were going fast, and all I could manage was a sailing four days in the future, but we were hoping to get out much sooner.

The train was full of stranded passengers like us, and we had been told that the ferries had been operating at near capacity to move the sudden exodus of airline passengers. Though the queue at the ferry terminal stretched almost back to the doors, we walked calmly up to the desk and managed to exchange our tickets (and cabin) for a ride on the next ferry out. Excellent!

Through customs and up the gangway we went, into the bowels of the ship that would carry us across the sea. The Hollandica can carry more than 900 people, and it seemed today that the ship was filled to capacity. Travelers sprawled out through the seven decks, taking their rest anywhere they could find it. The onboard casino and restaurant looked more like a refugee camp, with luggage and small children strewn about the room. Up on deck, the ship’s horn sounded its departure, and we set sail.

The rumbles deep within the ship translated into movement, and the ship lumbered down the canal and out onto the open ocean. The wind turbines spinning lazily in the distance waved us a goodbye as the waterway lost its boundaries and breakwaters to the expanse of the North Sea.

Being a landlubber from a state surrounded on all sides by other states, I had never been on a ship or a body of water of this size before. The sensation of movement was only discernible when the ship pitched and rolled slightly on the sea. Up on the sun deck, the gulls circled for handouts, and a few brave souls pitched tents in the wind and curled up for a few hours’ nap. Allie and I settled down in a corner of the restaurant-turned-refugee deck and chatted up some of our fellow passengers.

Charlie, 22, was on his way back to the UK after his spring holiday, much like Allie and I were. His mates had caught an earlier ferry, and now Charlie was playing catch-up. The prognosis now looked rosy; he (and we) were on our way, now nearly fifty miles out to sea, headed for jolly ole England. Suddenly, we noticed something odd: smoke rising from a trash can nearby. We investigated, and found what we suspected to be a smoldering fire caused by a discarded cigarette. Charlie and I leapt into action, sacrificing our beers for the sake of saving the Hollandica from a certain, fiery doom. Well, okay, maybe not fiery doom…but at least a shrieking fire alarm.

The sun began to set on the sea, and I took a moment to find a quiet corner of the deck near the lorry drivers’ lounge to get some photos. I can see now why travel by sea has tugged at people since time immemorial; there is a certain serenity that comes with the expanse of water, the quiet, faraway whoosh of the bow of the ship slicing through the waves. Once in a while, a group of gulls would make a pass on the ship, trying to find some handouts from generous travelers. My mind was on the hours ahead, on getting back to England and, all too soon, returning to the States. Commence reflection/contemplation/etc.

Soon enough, the sun was setting as the ship came into Harwich. Back on the sun deck, we watched as the ferry swung itself around and pulled alongside its berth. The sunset that greeted us to the UK was orange-red with the volcanic ash still being spewed by Iceland, but now and again we could see the contrails of the first planes to dip their toes into the cloud. The ban would soon be lifted, but we were still glad to have been able to make it back across Europe during the shutdown. Our plan had been an unqualified success.

Allie and I bid Charlie goodbye and headed through customs to the Harwich International rail station. Our last journey of the night would take us from here to Liverpool Street in London, and from there it was only another tube ride to the hostel. The train pulled away from Harwich, and almost as soon as it had, Allie and I were asleep in our backpacks. The hostel in Borough couldn’t come soon enough.

This may have had something to do with the fact that it was slightly heavier with provisions for leg 2 of the run to Amsterdam (provisions being bread, cheese, and beer – it was Germany, after all).  It may have been the hundreds of kilometers I’d already covered that day.  Whatever the reason, train #2, IC 142 to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam squeaked to a stop at the platform in Berlin and I hopped aboard.  The tweet of the conductor’s whistle sounded the all clear, and the last of the train crew scurried back aboard.  With a hiss of air from the brakes, we pulled out of Berlin and made haste for the Dutch border.  This ride would be a 6 hour jaunt from Berlin, north to Hanover, across the Dutch frontier at Bad Bentheim, and on to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.  From Schiphol, I’d change to one last local train to Centraal Station, and from there I’d trudge to the hostel and pass out.

That’s 120 miles an hour, for those not metrically inclined.

Time passed quickly.  The ride through the north of Germany reminded me (for better or worse) of parts of Wisconsin.  I walked the train, dodging suitcases and bodies flung willy-nilly around the passageways.  It was a completely full train, carrying volcano refugees from all over Europe, people whose stress was palpable in any of the dozens of languages they were speaking.  We were all trying to get somewhere.  Today, I’d rack up around 1000 km (621 miles), crossing parts of three countries.  Based on some of the languages I heard shouted into mobile phones and tossed up and down the corridors, I’d say that some of the passengers beat my mileage handily.  The Dutch border came and went, with only a brief stop just barely on the German side to mark the occasion.  Bad Bentheim was a border control town back in the days before the EU, but with the coming of the Schengen Agreement, it became merely a crew change and a chance to stretch.  I welcomed the respite from the tight corridors of the train.  The sun would be going down soon.  Two hours to go.

The train pulled out for the last stretch to Amsterdam.  The passengers could feel the miles tick off; the chatter in the passageway turned less heated, the bags slowly left their homes in the aisles, and the shrieks of small children caged up in compartments for too long subsided.  Fields of giant wind turbines spun lazily in the distance, turned by the same winds that blew through the sails of the famous Dutch windmills decades ago. Picturesque farms dotted the landscape as we sped through the hills east of Amersfoort, blurring together into a sleepy haze as the sun finally fell below the horizon. No sooner had I begun to doze than the speaker shouted something in Dutch – I caught ‘Schiphol’ somewhere in there.

Schiphol Airport is one of the busiest airports in Europe.  Every year, 46.3 million passengers move through its halls, going anywhere from Moscow to Houston.  At this hour, Schiphol should be receiving late-night transatlantic flights, processing hundreds of passengers through customs, and sending off hundreds more for long-haul flights destined to awake in far-off lands.  Instead, there was nothing.  Not the chatter of the intercom paging in three different languages, not the shrill buzzer of the first bags coming off a late night flight, not even the ceaseless flow of passengers trying to get wherever they’re trying to get.  Iceland’s temper tantrum had not relented, and this night there were only a few holdouts left clustered around the information screens, hoping for some good news after being stranded for so long.

The KLM counter was the center of the universe at that moment. A handful of people, maybe 20 or so, clustered around one obviously exhausted airline agent. She kept repeating the same litany she had been telling desperate fliers all day: no, there were no flights out that night, airspace over Europe was still closed. No, she could not refund your ticket; by now all the ticket agents at the counter had left for the night. Yes, she could help you find a place to stay for the night, but with all the stranded people, space was filling up fast.

A couple from Chicago walked up to her. The woman was pregnant; obviously so, and the man had clearly had too little sleep and too much coffee. They had been stuck in Amsterdam for 27 hours (he had been keeping track), having come here from Frankfurt with the hope of catching a flight back to O’Hare. The gate agent told them the same thing she had told the exasperated passenger before, then paused and added a morsel of hope to the stew of emotions brewing in the terminal. She told the couple that a few hours ago, in the dark of night, KLM had flown a 747 full of passengers out of JFK Airport in New York. The flight landed safely in Amsterdam only twenty minutes before.

“So you mean they might be flying tomorrow? Really?”

“Yes, ma’am, but I cannot guarantee-”

“But they might be flying tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, ma’am, they might.”

The couples’ faces lit up. Both had been running for the door, just like me, and the end to their inadvertently extended holiday was now in sight.

I returned to the train station beneath the airport and hitched a ride on a train to Centraal Station in the heart of Amsterdam. Sleep came quickly, the booming bass from the nightclub beneath my hostel bed notwithstanding. Earplugs, mate. Big must-have for trying to sleep at the fringe of the Red Light District.