Luke Lussier is an urban explorer, camper, and traveler.

It was after scouring Google Maps that I found this abandoned radar base in Vermont. It’s high up enough that only short pine trees grow there. It consists of several towers on top of a mountain, one of them is about four stories tall. They used to have big radar domes on top of the towers, to search for incoming Soviet bombers in the ‘50s. When you’re on top of the highest tower, you can see to Canada. You can see the White Mountains from the north side. You’re the tallest thing in the area. At night, you can see the entire Milky Way galaxy. There are three smaller towers. They’re only two floors tall, but they’re held up on stilts. They’re completely empty now. It’s just rooms with pipes. You can imagine when you’re standing in there that it used to be full of machines and big radar screens.

Nobody owns the place, lots of animals up there. I guess they poured a bunch of oil on the ground when they left because they didn’t want to transport it out. It poisoned the ground. There were multiple access roads to get there, but all of them were blocked and gated. We finally found one that led through a completely abandoned town, where the airmen would have lived while they worked the base. They blocked the road to the base with a massive oil tank. Since then, people have diverted around it by driving down into the swamp and then back out of the swamp again. After that, the road is beautiful. It’s beautifully paved because nobody ever plows or salts it. There’s not a crack in the pavement. It’s fresh.

We had a big group, ten people. It poured rain on us the entire time. We got to the top and searched through these towers to find a dry place to camp. We settled on this hangar-type building. It used to be either a power generation building or a computer building to interpolate what the radar was doing. It has no walls anymore. It’s held up by these big metal trusses. The roof is corrugated steel and a lot of the panels are missing or hanging down. I will never sleep in that spot again because there are these holes in the floor that go down to the lower level. It’s a ten foot drop. Some of these holes are big enough to drop a car through, some are just big enough for a person to slip through. Once people started getting a little intoxicated, it was very nerve wracking. But it was partially covered and it was enough for us to get by. We set up our site and put up a couple tents.

There was already a group of four guys up there camping. These poor guys, they told us they had been there for several nights. I don’t know if they had a lot of experience camping, because their ground tarps extended out from the sides of their tent, so the tent was full of water. All of their stuff was soaked. They didn’t have a fire. It’s like they were up there to die. They were completely unprepared. They were like, “Can we hang out with you guys? You have a fire.” Two more people came up the mountain, a pair of women. They went off and found their own spot to camp on the mountaintop. Once it got dark, they came over. They had run out of firewood. All of theirs was either burned already or too wet to light, so they joined us.

We had this congregation of strangers, like the last supper of urbexers, sitting around the fire. Everyone brought a different piece of food and we combined it together into a stew in a cast iron Dutch oven over the fire, which was on the bare concrete of the floor. We had beef, potatoes, carrots, and corn. At one point, our cook opened the top to stir it. One of the logs in the fire popped and threw a handful of chunks of charcoal straight into the stew. We had to spend about 20 minutes fishing out pieces of charcoal.

Night fell, everyone went to bed. I ended up sleeping in a hammock, which was the move. The rain fell on the tarp above my head. It was the best sleep I’ve ever had outside. I was so dry, everyone else was so wet.

Morning comes. We wake to blue skies — not blue as in the sun’s coming up, but blue as in it’s so cloudy that everything is dark blue. We’re in the clouds. My best boy Dan and my best boy Justin come to me before anybody else wakes up. They say, “Hey, we have to scram. We gotta do some stuff today. Would you be able to bring us down to the bottom of the mountain in your car?” They left theirs at the abandoned town, because they wouldn’t have been able to make the journey up the mountain with it. I said, “Yeah, hop in. Let’s go.” We had the heat on, it was wonderful.

We start driving down the road. It’s so narrow that back in the day they used to have to radio if somebody was coming up or down because you can’t pass another car on that road. As we’re going down, we get into the tree line. It starts getting really dense and foggy and dark. Out of the fog comes this apparition. It scares the crap out of us because it was like a Scooby-Doo monster. You know how they used to glow? This reflective man comes out of the forest. What the hell? It was a guy that had retro reflective bands on his legs and arms. Turns out he was an ornithologist on the hunt for a rare bird.

At five in the morning, he comes out of the woods and stops us. He goes, “Hey, there’s a tree that fell across the road down there.”

We’re like, “How big of a tree?”

“Well, you should just go take a look at it.”

So we go down the road, almost all the way to the bottom. This massive tree has fallen. It’s taken out two smaller trees and it’s right across the road. Justin and Dan hike the rest of the way to their car. I have to back my car all the way up the mountain. Dread is starting to set in. How are we going to get out of here? I don’t have a saw on me. I only have a felling axe. I’m thinking, “Maybe one of the guys at the other camp has a chainsaw,” because he has this overland rig with all these fuel tanks. He did not have a chainsaw.

I’m like, “Everybody, I’ve got bad news: We’re stuck up here. There’s a tree across the road we have to get rid of to leave.” We’re all groaning about it, but we gotta do it. We get in our cars and head down the mountain. We get to the felled tree and start hacking at it with my axe. It took us an hour to get through this thing, but we finally made it. I had some blue spray paint in the car, so I wrote “You’re welcome” on the ground where the tree once sat.

Then we went and had the best breakfast ever in a warm restaurant. I had the Lumberjack Special — two pancakes, two eggs, bacon.

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Masthead

Editor-in-chief — Andrew Fedorov

Rails Editor — Connor McFarland

Altitude Editor — Matt Gu