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Expeditions


This page is one I've been meaning to put up for a while, in order to chronologically list some of the UEC expeditions which are significant of their own accord but which don't warrant the addition of a new Conquests page and, as such, don't end up being logged anywhere. I've been putting off actually adding it due to not having enough expedition write-ups to start with, but I never really ended up making any due to not having an Expeditions page to put them on. So, at long last, being the decisive man of action that I am, I've linked the page that Asher whipped up when I wouldn't quit whinging one afternoon. It's only got a few write-ups right now but it shall grow as I add some of the many expeditions I plan to. I may write up some of the more interesting expeditions since the Toronto one in the meantime. We'll see.
-snee


Homage To The Happy Hour God.
September 4th, 2002
Asher recently discovered that the Happy Hour drain had been forced open by someone recently, so she and Static and I went in to check it out for the first time in months (it's been really well-sealed by the city up until now, they even welded the downstream manholes). At any rate, we explored a bit, showed Static the bizarre "party chamber" and were about to go further upstream when we heard voices from the entrance. Asher yelled back at the voices and we all headed back to the entrance to see what was happening. As it turned out, a bunch of frightened twelve-year-olds were there, acting tough or something. They ran away when I tried to get a picture, accusing us of being "pedophiles" (which, as everyone knows, live underground). At any rate, Asher chatted briefly with them, went over the usual run of questions ("what's it like down there?" "Do people live down there?" "Are there lights?") and eventually we decided to turn around and go back into the drain, since we'd attracted something of an audience at the entrance and didn't want to just walk out and away in front of a dozen some-odd local people. The kids seemed to want to join us, yelling at us to wait because they were "coming in" and needed our light, so we ran like bastards. Taking responsibility for the lives of a half-dozen twelve-year-olds in a city drain wasn't how I'd planned to spend my evening.
We ran upstream a bit to find an unwelded manhole to exit through, but they were all on a mildly-busy road. What we eventually decided was that, since Static had had a tough time fitting in through the tight entrance in the first place and didn't want to do it again to get out, I would go back out the entrance (enough time having passed that the gawkers would certainly have lost interest and dispersed), find the manhole they were currently under and signal them when there was no traffic.
So, I took a flashlight, left our camera with Asher and tromped back to the downstream entrance, squeezed out, checked that the crowd was, in fact, gone, and headed to the road we knew the Happy Hour to run under. When I got there, though, I got slightly disoriented, and ended up running down the wrong road for a full five minutes, shouting at manhole lids and peering through the holes with my light. A lot of people thought I was crazy. Eventually I got my bearings, went back to the intersection where the pipe splits and turned the right way. As it turned out, it didn't take long to find the chamber Asher and Static were in because they'd grown bored of waiting for me and were already trying to open it. In the middle of the road, a few dozen feet ahead of me, was a manhole slightly-ajar illuminated bright yellow from underneath by Static's mag-light. I ran over, shone my light in and helped them lift the lid. Suddenly, of course, the road filled with cars, so we stomped the lid into place and I scurried onto the sidewalk. (We normally never, ever pop lids in the middle of the road, but this was a special case or something.) Their next attempt to get the lid off (an unusually massive iron deal, what with being designed to be run over repeatedly) resulted in having it about halfway out of the collar when a small family sedan drove by, slowly. The woman driving the car slowed down as she approached the open manhole, despite me waving her along in a friendly fashion. Finally, she stopped and started rolling down the window, much to my chagrin.
"What are you doing?" She said, "did you open that?"
"Um, just a second, ma'am," I said, helping to lift the manhole lid away from the collar. She gaped at us as Static and Asher climbed out, filthy, in turn.
"What are you doing?"
"A survey for the city."
"You are not, that's bullshit!"
"Well, a survey OF the city, anyway."
"Close that right now, before I call the police!"
"Look, do you want to see our photos?"
And then she drove away. What a bitch.
Anyway, Static had strongarmed the lid back into its place and by this point we had accumulated our second appreciative audience of the night so we fled the scene. What a fun thing. :D

-Snee


Sutton, Smelter, Spiders.
May 25th, 2002
Saturday morning Static, Asher and I departed for Sutton in a certain blip in the laws of physics which we will call, for want of a better word, Static's Car. Seeing as it would take over eighty dollars of gas over the course of the weekend and had a tendency to stall when stopping, accelerating, or turning (the funny thing is you think I'm exaggerating), it was obviously the perfect vehicle to take us along the elabourate path we'd planned out.
Our first destination upon departing from Barrie was the little city of Sutton, which we managed to find after exceeding our originally estimated travel time by a factor of two. It was actually a surprisingly nice place and the local Giant Tiger had some great prices on disposable point-and-shoots. The plan was to meet with Y.O. Media and discuss some environmental action Asher had been involved with, then go to explore the nearby abandoned smelter. After that, we were to meet with a fellow in Toronto who knew of some areas where he suspected underground structures to exist, and from there we would try to find somewhere to sleep. We hoped to see some of the buildings featured in Doors Open Toronto before leaving, so the next morning's plans consisted of meeting with Ninjalicious and Liz of Infiltration to poke around the Toronto Island Airport, and we would sort of wing it from there.
We did manage to eventually find the Y.O. Media building, where there turned out to be cozy couches. After working out some details of one thing or another they gave us a map to the Keswick Smelter, thus saving us the trouble of trying to find it ourselves (a plan which rarely pans out for us). We stopped for lunch, bought some cameras and candy and off we went. The details of the smelter itself are, of course, on the Smelter write-up, but suffice to say it was a small but highly nifty building. Apparently the township of Georgina has recently taken responsibility for knocking it down and cleaning up the land around it, so anyone who wants to check it out themselves ought to do so soon. Y.O. Media places it as "in Keswick, on Warden Ave. (5th Concession), just north of Ravenshoe Road", and you can contact either us or them for better directions. It's right next door to the town dump, if that helps.
We probably spent about an hour at the smelter, taking photos, climbing all over it and generally seeing what there was to see. Then we were off to stop over at a concert Y.O. Media was holding, where we discussed the Smelter a bit until our Toronto-based fellow (the one in search of subterranean mystery) called and let us know that he couldn't make it. This left us without any solid plans for the rest of the day but we decided to head for Toronto nonetheless. By this point it was raining fairly hard so we didn't search for drains much along the way. We managed to get pretty severely lost on the way there but we did make it eventually.
Finding three people to be a slightly awkward number to sneak around active buildings with, and deciding against visiting other sites for reasons I can't recall now, we decided instead to visit Mordac. We went for coffee then stayed at Mordac's for the night.
The next morning the four of us departed for the ferry to the airport (which is right next to the fabled Malt Plant), got in touch with Ninjalicious, arranged to meet in half an hour, went back to Mordac's place briefly and returned to the ferry about one hour and thirty-six stalls later. There we met Ninjalicious and Liz and crossed the channel to the airport, where there turned out to be little of note. The buildings themselves were few and mostly unimpressive and security was quick to let us know about which areas were off-limits for us. While there may have been some fun places to see there, there wasn't much chance to. There was no organized tour per se, although there was a lecture of sorts about the airport's history going on in one building and of course there was much memorabilia for sale in various places. After looking around for a little while, we left the airport, at which point Ninjalicious and Liz went off for food and we four UEC'ers headed to Union Station.
Soon after we arrived Mordac decided to head home and get some proper sleep, leaving Static, Asher and I to snoop around. Every time I visit Union the first thing I do is head for the employee parking garages and try the doors to the steam tunnels, which have in my experience always been locked. This time was no different, to our dismay, but as we considered going up a little car-ramp to the rest of the garage we noticed a small door near us, partway up the wall, wide open. We checked that nobody was paying attention to us then climbed through the doorway, into a sandy little cavern full of abandoned toilets, lit by a few lightbulbs and with thick beams running horizontally across it in places, which one had to duck under. This was the fabled "D6", a small, sandy cavern first mentioned on Infiltration in March. We explored its depths for a while, and I crawled as far into the small trench carved across it as I could, but it came to an end not too far under the wall. We didn't get any photos, having exhausted our film at the Smelter, but the Viewing Hole Gallery has several right here.
As we looked around the cool little area, we heard voices nearby. Several of them. It sounded like a great deal of people were coming towards us. I half-expected to be apprehended by a panicked SWAT team, thinking we were looking for critical supports to plant our C-4 around, so we hid in the shadows and listened to see if they were coming any closer.
The voices and footsteps didn't seem to draw nearer, so Static stuck his head out the door and advised us that nobody was in sight. We jumped back out into the garage and took a right, up the aforesaid car ramp --
And walked into the backs of about five dozen people. It seemed the tour Union was offering for Doors Open Toronto actually came down through these garages, and we had just unwittingly joined it. None of the TTC employees herding everyone together had noticed our sudden appearance, but they weren't about to let us leave again, so we took it in stride, following the tour throughout more of the garage and finally back outside, where the guide abandoned us and we made our way back into the train station.
This happened a second time while we explored some areas off of the main hall so we decided to finally take the damn tour from the beginning to see where it goes altogether. This made three times we'd taken the tour, which was becoming tiresome, and I expect the guide started to recognize us. Either way, I was overjoyed when we were ushered into the office areas, which I'd never seen before. We were taken up a staircase and through some of the impressive glass corridors, constantly waiting for a good point to split off. In retrospect, we had a few opportunities, but it became clear that we'd waited too long when the next "area" we were shown was actually a fire escape stairway, only wide enough to walk single-file, leading straight down to the exit of the offices, where another TTC employee helpfully held the door for us. There was no escape.
Dismayed and back in a public area, we left the station and drove somewhere. Eventually we stopped, broke out a Toronto map and decided to play the Drain Findin' Game, eventually locating a river that disappeared under a suburb. We drove out to it -- a neighbourhood near Maxome Road, I believe -- parked at an elementary school and headed down to the water.
The first thing we came across was a massive culvert going just under the road. It was about nine feet high and at least fifteen feet wide, consisting of what looked like two separate nine-foot corrugated pipes sort of joined together near the middle. Seeing as we were headed downstream of the beast, we had reason to hope that the next thing we discovered would only get larger.
We followed the stream for some distance, until it forked off to our left. Since we could see homes not far off in that direction, we opted to follow that fork upstream for a distance and return to follow the stream later. I'm always skeptical about running drains upstream, since things tend to get smaller as you go in that direction, but figured we might as well check.
As it turned out, we were led to the mouth of a drain that was not at all too shabby and perfectly accessible. The six-foot high corrugated pipe is now known as the Arachnoslide drain, and is the only place we've ever encountered the Dread White Nightmare Spiders of Doom.
Static and I decided to "scout" it, to see if it was any good (rather than shrinking to a three-foot pipe at the first manhole chamber), so we went in while Asher waited. As it turned out, she didn't wait nearly as long as it took us to navigate the drain past the first few chambers and two slides -- we couldn't help it, it was just so nifty. When we came back out, she was nowhere to be found, so we followed the main stream for a while until we met back up with her. She'd done some scouting of her own and told us that this stream didn't go to where we'd originally been looking on the map, and that the drain under a suburb that we'd been looking for wasn't connected to it. We told her that was okay, because the drain we'd found was a big old bundle of slippery steel joy.
We drove out of the suburbs to a nearby strip mall, where we bought a disposable camera and some drinks, then tackled the drain properly, the details of which are of course in the write-up.
Finally, after emerging from the Arachnoslide and packing our stuff into the car, we opted to head for home. We photographed some geese on the way and ended up getting home at about eleven PM on Sunday. It was a fairly full weekend, all things considered, except that I never did get to check our guestbook in the Malt Plant. Ah well.
-Snee


Toronto Excursion
February 16th, 2002
This excursion was planned over a week in advance, giving us an unusually high amount of time to plan. We actually coordinated the whole ordeal fairly well and established a pretty good list of people who'd be coming and targets we wanted to hit.
By the time we had put our plans into a sort of feature-freeze, Filter Boy was coming up and picking up Asher, Dain Bramaged, Grebin, Zenn, Static and myself, then we would meet Sema4 at a local Tim Horton's, split up our passengers and equipment and head south to Toronto at about 4:30AM. On the way down, we would meet HyperViper at a highway service stop and then go to the Malt Plant, where we would meet Krall and Mordac. This is, in fact, almost exactly what happened.
Aside from getting out of Barrie a bit late (which was to be expected), we had surprisingly few teeth-grinding hang-ups and the only part of the plan to be left hanging upon our arrival at the plant was the fact that both Krall and Mordac were absent. Their presence wasn't certain in the first place so we weren't particularly worried. More upsetting was the police cruiser we discovered, parked around the side of the Malt Plant, right by the water.
We opted not to enter with the cruiser parked so nearby and instead walked around the water, to the docks across from the plant, to try to gauge the risk presented by the car and whether or not the plant had been altered by the city since we were last there. Most of us figured that the cop in question was just doing paperwork, having a smoke, dumping a corpse or some other such inoccuous pastime, but there was no reason to taunt him. Fortunately by the time talk arose of going to another site first, the cruiser simply turned around and left. This would have clinched it for us, and in we'd have gone, if not for some vague reference Mordac had made a while back about seeing a security presence patrolling the building. It crossed our minds that the cruiser could have either been monitoring the building at night, and was leaving because the contracted security's workday was beginning, or the cruiser itself represented the night security and this was simply a shift-change. If that was the case, I wanted more than ever to get in right away, before anyone else arrived, but others opted to be more cautious.
We hung around a while longer, chatting about various reasons the cruiser could have been there, but finally our patience for caution ran out. Static and I opted to run across the plant grounds to our recent entrance of choice and radio back to the other six, who were waiting by the cars and watching to see if anyone else came in. It quickly became apparent that our usual entrance was untouched by city hands and as wide open as ever, so we radioed everyone, who had been preparing their equipment ahead of time, to lock up the cars and make their way over as quickly as possible. At this point it was about 6:30AM and some ambient light was beginning to illuminate our entry, so we moved fast.
Once everyone was in, we gave the brief, obligatory lecture on abandoned building etiquette for the few who hadn't been in one before, then we went on our way. Our first target was the highest point on the building, and we made it there at about 7:20AM after stopping several times along the way for photo shoots and various illuminating gravity demonstrations for people who were still getting their head around just how high up we were. When we hit the roof, the sun was only a few minutes from coming up.
I'd never had the chance to be up here during daylight, and the skyline looked radically different than it did during our numerous night outings. We took plenty of great photos, regretted that we had forgotten (again) a guestbook to leave up there (or even a marker or crayon to leave a small UEC tag), split a ceremonial beverage and then made our way back into the plant.
We went through the plant in our usual manner, exploring every nook and cranny and, as usual, finding a few new things we'd never noticed before. We'd only been here during the daylight once before and we didn't go far then -- this time, the whole plant was our oyster. The only limitation on our time there was the good chance that we'd get towed for parking on the road illegally after 8:00AM, but we had numerous vantage points from which to assure ourselves that our cars were still sitting out there (a very long way below us), so it didn't weigh on our minds. We made our way all over the building and took lots of very cool photos, while managing to terrify Zenn profoundly with heights, holes, drops and dodgy floors, stairs and ceilings like she'd never seen before.
One thing that set this excursion apart from previous visits to the plant was the opportunity to finally conquer the long, high, terrifying iron stairway climbing the front of the building. The first time we pulled up to this building, some time ago, that stairway was the first thing I noticed and I said that that was where I wanted to get to. I was half-kidding at the time -- the stairway was clearly so old, broken, dodgy and deadly that the idea of climbing it was worth a laugh at best. Still, on this day, just after we'd entered the front building and a few people went to explore a roof that we'd previously written off as not containing much of interest, Static and Grebin discovered that a series of service ladders and collapsing tunnels could take them to a roof outside a room full of large vats where the door to outside was welded shut, and from there it was just a few hops to the base of the scariest stairway on Earth.
Grebin and Static decided to climb the thing, even over a spot where five stairs were completely detached on one side (I think my favourite quote from that outing was Static's "that's... one, two, three, four... five! Five broken stairs! How the hell did you do that?"). When Grebin and Static were about halfway up the side of the building, in broad daylight, some city people pulled into the truckyard in front of the plant, and Asher radioed them to come back down. Grebin acknowledged and started heading down the stairs, but Static, reluctant to go past the broken section again (which they had accomplished by putting their feet on the narrow frame of the stairway and supporting themselves on the outer wall of the building) decided to go all the way to the stop, then take a ladder onto the roof and get into the elevator building at the top floor. It was a wacky thing to see.
We all got back into the building, so as not to be spotted by the city worker, but eventually my draw to the stairway overtook me and I insisted everyone hold up while I went and scaled it myself. I did so, and it was one of the most profoundly terrifying, exhilirating and fulfilling things I've ever done. Er, it was also really stupid. And probably suicidal. Especially the part where the frame started to break when I used it to pull myself past the broken steps. Each step, incidentally, wasn't rivetted to the frame or attached in some other sane manner, but rather just kind of dropped between the frame (which is comprised of two long, flat iron rods, one of which is bolted to the building in a questionable fashion at certain points) and spot-welded once on either side. The stairway was a deathtrap. Fun. Somewhat terrified, I made it to the top and took Static's route back in. It kicked ass.
After we finished with the plant (we were there three and a half hours and, surprisingly, we never got towed), we drove out of downtown, lost each other, found each other again and went to the Yorkdale mall for some food. We did a bit of exploration while there but didn't accomplish anything terrifically noteworthy, and after hanging around for about an hour we decided we needed something else to do. On our list for the day had been the Metro Toronto Convention Center and several other big ol' downtown attractions, but we were out of the downtown now and not eager on turning around and going back. Instead, Asher spent a few minutes in a Drainer Zen state with a map of Toronto and decided that there was a drain in a park not far from us. We had a destination.
We drove out to the park, parked the cars on the street and walked down to the river flowing by a walking path. We split up into two groups and each explored along the river in a different direction, radioing back anything we found. It didn't take long to fall out of radio contact range but shortly afterwards, Static, Asher, Dain Bramaged and I came across a very cool, seven-foot barred drain entrance. If we could get in, it would be an upstream journey. While the three of them worked on filling the water in front of the bars with rocks and shopping carts in order to allow access to the entrance without soaking oneself, I headed back the way we came in the hopes of establishing radio contact with the other group again. This I did, and they informed me that they had found an eight-foot corrugated pipe entrance that was too secure to enter without heavier equipment. Grebin was confident that a manhole across the street opened into it, but rather than exploring that option we went back to where my group was working at the drain they'd found. By the time we got there, Static had pulled two of the bars far enough apart for an average-sized person to fit through, and fit through we did. The drain was a wonder after all the tiny pipes Barrie has insulted us with in the past -- it displayed three distinct architectures and had many odd little side-pipes. Somewhat upsetting was what appeared to be a pipe with a sanitary presence pouring in -- there was no telltale macro-sewage but it seemed likely that either there was a small leak from a san pipe somewhere, or the drain had been dumped into by a CSO in a recent storm. Mind you, we only discovered this on the way back.
The upstream exit was barred and basically impenetrable, but not more than eight feet past it was the entrance to another drain. We whinged, we whimpered, we cursed, then we decided to turn around. The drain was a long trek and by the time we got out we were all quite humid enough for one day, so we elected to head for the Caledon Radar Station.
Previous excursions to find the station had resulted in disappointment, since we had been completely unable to find it after our first outing with Krall and HyperViper (who were the only ones who REALLY knew where it was). This time, we not only had HyperViper with us, but we had some sane directions from a small group who managed to luck upon the place while following the vague pointers we'd given them. We didn't have to go far before we came across the station, so we parked, unpacked our stuff, told the numerous friendly people who stopped that we weren't having any car trouble thank-you-very-much, and off to the station we raced.
It was as nifty as ever and many decent photos were taken. Somehow, Static managed to not go up the antenna tower the whole time we were there, so we must return sometime solely for that reason. :D The documents whose safety I had feared for were actually in excellent condition and there was much enlightenment to be had from them, as always. We saw a new room which had been magnanimously opened and all things considered it was a fairly good excursion. It took a fair bit of time and gas to get there and it would have been nicer if it was, say, a thirty-story abandoned missile silo with bomb shelters and bunkers instead, but for what it is it was worth the trip.
We figured we were done for the day so we all went home. All things considered we had an abnormally succesful, coordinated outing and we saw many cool things (not to mention exploring our first proper Toronto drain, considering the nature of the York Mills as basically a short tunnel to a terrifying waterfall). A good excursion, nobody died, nothing got lost and discoveries were made. Hooray!

-Snee



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