Road to Nowhere

Emmitt and I were out looking for adventure today... and didn't find it. We were going to look for a mining museum near a huge former mercury mining area. The museum was being renovated when we got there, so no dice. I love taking roads out to the middle of nowhere, so I kept going passed the museum. We ended up behind the mining area on a road I hadn't been on since I was into cycling (something like 15 years ago). We found a road that I had ridden by numerous times but never took.

At the end of the road (and top or the mountain) is an old, closed down Air Force base that served as a radar station during the Cold War era. You can see the huge block that was the base station for the huge radar dish on the top of Mt. Umunhum from miles away (look really close at the square on the peak in the middle of the picture).

Here's what it looked like in it's operational days.

I've always wanted to see the thing up close, so when I realized which road we had stumbled upon, I pooped my diaper (again). I thought it was closed to the public, so I got kind of excited to see that it was open. Up we went, and the big block got closer and closer.

Everything was going great until we saw this:
BUMMER.

Undeterred, I hauled Emmitt out of the car, and asked him if he wanted to see the "big block" as he called it. He said yes, and we started hoofin' it. I put him on my shoulders, got over the fence and started hiking up the road (and I mean up).

As Silicon Valley got further and further away, the base got closer. The view was great too. Those buildings, or white and red smudges, down there are where Adobe and several other software folks camp out.

We hiked up as far as we were legally allowed, until we hit another sign without a gate that warned us of the stiff penalty for trespassing. I was distracted by the barking dogs and yelling coming from a couple of trailer homes off to the side of the sign, so I neglected to get a picture of the "Turn Back" sign. Besides red neck n' dogs fear, I'm broke, so fines are a deal breaker for me. Emmitt was bumbed out, but we made up for it by repeating lines from Ice Age 3 back to each other while he rode on my shoulders down the hill.

This is a shot from as close as we could get to the "block."

The area up there is beautiful though, so it wasn't a wasn't a wasted trip. This is what it looked like over the steep drop on the side of the road.

Even though we didn't make it to the top, I did find a picture of what it looked it looked like at the base a year ago when the unit that ran that place had their reunion. While I was waiting for my pictures to upload, I lifted this picture from http://www.jaber.net/AAFS-Reunion-2008/.