Posted by Chawbee I am looking at a pretty cool place right now and hope to get some great pics from somewhere that hasn't been accessed in a while
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Good luck with that.
Welcome to MSP Exploring - we seem to be back on the part of the cycle where a new wave of explorers are bleeding out of all the pores of the city. Which is fun and exciting, make no mistake, but it brings about a particular set of problems that are unique to MSP Exploring.
We don't have a lot of abandoned buildings, anymore. And we have hardly any "derps" that you can casually bounce in and out of without regard to consequences. Other exploring communities are built on the notion that if an entrance gets sealed, well fuck it they can just make a new one or move on down the road to that OTHER awesome factory that just got opened last week. And that's great for them, I'm totally jealous, truth be told. But as you've seen what we have isn't even above ground. What we have should be (used to be) very well hidden and discrete, because it can be taken away (sometimes permanently) with almost no effort by a city with any kind of a budget. The exploring community here has quietly thrived for decades BECAUSE we're quiet about it.
You should know that we try not to use names (and absolutely no entrance details) in public around here. In fact, the responsible people try to minimize their online presence altogether. Everything you "find," especially in the sandstone, is only available because other explorers have spent, sometimes literally, HUNDREDS of man-hours of work making it available. Those hundreds of hours of tedious hand digging by drunken hooligans are frequently undone on a whim by the city who has access to an endless supply of concrete. One cement truck, one crane with a big rock, can undo months of labor. One welded manhole lid in a location where we can't discretely take tools to it can PERMANENTLY seal something wonderful.
And make no mistake, the twin cities have been on a tear the past few years and we've lost a lot of really cool stuff - many of which can be traced back to a specific incident, or even a specific PERSON, who triggered the sealing.
Don't be Donny. Don't be Travis.
Keep things quiet - I know you think that you're the first, but that's only because anyone responsible enough to see the big picture is being quiet about it so that big picture stays big.
As a community, we take a lot of heat for being secretive and elitist, but that's only because what we have is so very dear to us and it is so very easy to take it all away. When we lose a cave or a mine, we can't come back a week later and rip some plywood off or break a different window. We can't pick a lock or smash a door. We have to go back to the original surveys done by the city (and by us) maybe take a few more survey trips, and then organize and herd a bunch of drunken cats to begin a project that can take months of hard labor and still not accomplish anything if someone's measurements are even just a little off.
We're not assholes, we're not elitist, we're not trying to keep anyone OUT, we're just trying to keep things QUIET because we're tired of wasting our time, digging the same fifty foot tunnel through sandrock. (Because that shit gets in your teeth, in your lungs, in your bed, in your beer... it's terrible.)
Welcome to MSP Exploring. Keep looking, keep having fun, just keep quiet until you finally meet us. Make a few discrete posts, hook up with some of the locals, just PLEASE keep it off the (publicly accessible) internet.