''
I'm pretty sure there are only one or two more steep sections,'' I spat out between breaths while both Phil and I struggled to sustain enough forward momentum to keep from falling over. If you're ranking climbs from most bad to least bad, the one we were crawling up has all the hallmarks of the former. First off, rather than engaging singletrack, it's an access road of the kind that slows time down to a standstill, and it's covered with loose tennis-ball-sized rocks that shift and roll under your every pedal stroke. I also don't know how it's legal to build roads this steep, but I suspect it isn't. And, worst of all, there isn't even a trail at the top to come back down on.
What is up there, after three or four more steep sections, is a radio tower.
It's nothing too grand, just fifty-or-so-feet of steel bolted together, painted red and white, that's bouncing our calls and texts around from the top of a nameless sub-peak. A twelve-foot fence topped with scary-looking loops of razor wire encircles both the tower and a small building for the batteries and a humming generator, and plenty of red and orange signs with skulls and lightning bolts make it obvious they don't want visitors. That's okay, though, because just getting to the damn thing is the point.
Most of the time, all I want to find at the top of whatever mountain I've just pedaled up is some sort of amazing singletrack descent back to the bottom. But I also have a weird urge to find my way up to any and all radio towers in my town and surrounding area, a fixation that's been there long before I found bikes. We've all got our own "things" that we're into, and while there's even a woman who married the Eiffel Tower back in 2008, my own desires are more exploratory and probably don't require counseling. At least not this specific urge, anyway. Yet.
Long before I knew that our sport existed, I remember spotting a tower on the side of a local mountain that could only be seen from one particular angle. Nearly hidden by a fold in the hillside, it was positioned just halfway up the 3,000-foot mountain, but I also remember thinking how neat it would be to get myself there, probably a hearty quest for a ten-year-old that didn't realize most towers are accessed by maintenance trucks via 4x4 roads. No bushwacking needed, probably no bigfeet to fend off, and not exactly the Indiana Jones-style adventure I thought it'd be. Regardless, the notion that I just
needed to get to that damn tower - all the damn towers - has never gone away.
When I did eventually stumble onto it more than a decade later and after being lost on a maze of old logging and 4x4 roads, I discovered that it was barely twenty feet tall and one-hundred-percent rusty. There was no view to take in at the top, and the only reason I found it was because its old generator was shrieking so loudly I could hear it long before I saw it. At the time, though, it felt like something special that could finally tick off my list of senseless to-do tasks. As an added bonus, there was even a trail down from this one.
I've ridden to countless towers since then, some absolutely massive and others long abandoned and close to toppling, and another while it was being resupplied with diesel via helicopter as we had our unbuckled helmets blown off from a barely-safe distance. A buddy and I even found a three-legged Yorkshire Terrier while sitting at a different tower, and another served as the ideal spot to watch for UFOs late at night. And while I can't say I spotted anything unexplained (yet), my whole ''I gotta get to the tower'' mantra has fuelled all sorts of dumb adventures to other places that I probably shouldn't visit.
Not long ago, in the middle of another ill-advised adventure to some radio tower that I couldn't find, I somehow managed to spot a long-abandoned house through the trees. This wasn't just an old trapping or logging cabin, though, but a 2,000-square-foot, two-story house that, when finished, wouldn't be out of place in a middle-class subdivision with Jim and Nancy's Dodge Journey parked out front. Framed up with siding and stairs in place, it looked ready for insulation but had obviously been left near-untouched for a decade or two. The closest overgrown road, the one that I bushwacked through to get to the house, has decent-sized trees growing in the middle of it, so it's certainly been a while.
Sliding my way around a flat corner or finally rolling into a line that's scared me for too long is never going to get old, but I'll always want to simply go exploring as well. Over the years since, I've also found my way to caves and waterfalls, cabins and old logging camps full of rusty steel, plane crashes, illegal border crossings, some of the wildest viewpoints you could ever imagine, and a bunch of mines that seemed frozen in time. I doubt I would have seen any of it if I hadn't spotted the damn radio tower as a kid.
What's your radio tower? And what sort of things have you come across on your rides?
Hmm... Apparently it was a false summit, so got to go over there to the real summit. Okay... That's not the top either but I bet that rise over there is. ...hours later out of water you get to the highest point around and it is 100% worth it.
However, near the top of that hill, in the middle of nothing, there's an old sanatorium where they kept less fortunate kids. That place give me chills every time I pass by
Not sure what's worse, this or www.pinkbike.com/news/the-lasting-allure-of-radio-tower-rides.html (dated Apr 14, 2022, just a link to Beta)
In the San Francisco Bay Area, if you remove the fire roads and trails that were built to access radio towers, missile sites, and powerline towers, you'd be left with 27 yards of singletrack. Coming soon: "Trail Access Fee" on your PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) bills.
On the negative side, most, if not all, water companies severely limit access to the vast amount of lands they control. I get they have to protect watershed, but that argument doesn't hold much, um, water when you see them give a pass to hundreds of homeless people living on water company property in urban areas, yet security appears in an instant the second you jump a fence to access a fire road in a remote area in the mountains. (Ahem, Marin County, Santa Cruz Mountains, Crystal Springs Reservoir area, etc.)
So you can take collective shits in the watershed, but don't touch that creek with your randonneuring friends.
Once I even found a ping-pong table in a ruin, which was located in a remote and steep ravine, which was only accessible by foot or bike... no idea how it got there
It's not that they don't want visitors. It's that they don't want the bodies of dead idiots getting in the way of normal operations.
when I first started visiting my now fiancée I would wake up and see the top of a wind turbine turning on top of the mountain, I wrongly believed his to be part of the windy point trail at Afan(Glynncorrwg). Thus ensued a stupid idea of lets go ride the trail from home rather than drive 35mins to the start of them. A friend and I planned the ride using an OS map and off we went, soon to find out it wasn't where we thought and 4 hours later we arrived at our intended location wet and tired.
From that moment the desire to sit atop the mountain opposite and look back at my house was born.
Since then I have found three ways up to the Mynydd Pen-y-Cae and Craig-y-Llyn summits and found further adventures over into the next valley.
It all started with my radio tower being that wind turbine B08, I call him Bob
'Go then, there are other trails than these.'
100% agree with you on that one, I always have to do a ritualistic poop and fertilize nature.
"Leaves of three, wipe with me!"
Based on the first few paragraphs , it's not even "a take", they look identical.
Oh shit, changed "50" to "fifty"... Pay the man!
I hope the generator isn't usually humming. That would mean the power is out...
I once found some very interesting Hiway 50 markings on an abandoned stretch of road in the middle of nowhere (central Nevada). In the US, U.S.50 followed the 1st trans continental road we ever had, the Lincon Hiway.