Buckner Building: The Winter Palace

During the middle of last winter i was contacted by a Canadian author. He was interested in a picture from my Buckner Building Post a few years ago. In particular, he was interested in calcite formations leaching out of the concrete ceiling. He was working on a book related to that subject. Unfortunately, i didn't have a full resolution file of the image he wanted, in fact, I didn't even take the picture, Maree did, so i told him i'd just go take a new picture of it, and look for similar items of interest while i was in there.

The Green Room

It was the dead of winter, early February. I had never been to Whittier in winter, because..... well.... there's absolutely no reason to ever go to Whittier in winter. But i got lucky. The timing worked out so that when i was able to go out we had a freak warm front complete with Chinook winds. The temperature that day was about 42 degrees, delightful!

Since the Buckner Building is condemned, the snow plows ignore it. There are no nice shoveled entryways, you have to climb up out of the street and find a way in.

 This was the first room i entered from the outside. Looked like a cafeteria.

The warm weather of course made the ice roads in Whittier extremely slippery, I was wearing some grippy springs on my shoes (they were a lifesaver) but i hadn't accounted for the amount of snow Whittier gets in winter. They had over 5 feet of snow when i arrived. Many of the first floor rooms had snow ramps coming in through the windows, and i had to use one of these to get inside.

 I believe this was part of the adjoining kitchen area. Beyond this room it was very dark for a long time of searching.

These rooms divided by the the joints were cool because the snow on the ground in many of them was so clean. The room would generally be very dark and the light would be coming down through the joint illuminating this very pure looking snow.

As i've mentioned before, much of the Buckner Building is flooded. I wondered what it would be like in winter, and, as i had heard, it was very slippery. There was about two inches of solid ice in the flooded areas, and the warm weather had melted a few millimeters on the surface. This made the ice a mirror under the right lighting conditions. It was pretty cool.

 This time i found the rumored jail! The jail had some very tall, narrow cells in one part of it.

In a dark area of the building this single wall was illuminated by a joint in the ceiling. Some very strange stuff was going on with this wall. It looks blurry but it's not. On the right are calcite formations and everywhere else are strange ice formations.

Deeper in the jail. I brought a remote flash that i was playing with. All these half open doors are frozen into the floor.

From that point on i spent the next few hours looking for the calcite formation. I couldn't find it anywhere. After about two hours of wandering around i heard other people. I ended up coming upon them in a large dry area on the third floor.  They were doing some kind of teenage goth fashion model shoot. We talked a little and i could tell they were familiar with the building, but they had never seen what i was looking for.  Eventually i had systematically explored the first 4 floors of the building and it was almost sunset. The last place i decided to check out i found it!  Maree's description, from what she could remember, was off by 3 floors.

Some jerk left the door open to the high radiation area.

Also of note: I found the floor where the elevator is open. No way was i going in there. The sign inside says "Off Limits To All Troops."

This is what all the effort was for. It might seem strange, but it's really pretty rare to see a door with a complete calcium column attaching it to the ceiling. I was glad i brought the flash because it was pitch black here.

 In a nearby shower room i found these light fixtures. If you look close at the distant one you can see..... 

A light bulb encased in stone! That's not wax or paint, it's calcium carbonate. I don't know what's crazier, a light bulb inside rock or an unbroken light bulb in the Buckner Building.

So i got my shots and had to run back through the building to get to my car in time to make the next tunnel opening. The light would be gone soon and i didn't want to be stuck in Whittier in the dark. The fashion shoot guys got out right before me. I was stuck behind their truck the whole way back to town. It was a good time.

On last look before i headed back through the train tunnel. It turned out to be a nice sunset that day.

Ghost Towns: Silver City, Yukon Territory

Kluane Lake is the largest lake in the Yukon, and is close to 40 miles long. It used to flow into the Pacific Ocean but just a few thousand years ago a glacier damned it's outlet. Over time the lake filled up until it eventually created another outlet, flowing north towards the Yukon River. The glacier receded but the flow of the lake has been permanently altered.

On the southern shore of the lake, next to Destruction Bay, is a ghost town called Silver City. The Kluane Lake area was the site of a short-lived gold rush in the early 1900s. Dawson Charlie, one of the discoverers of gold in the Klondike, staked the first claim on 4th of July Creek in the summer of 1903. By the end of that year 2,000 claims had been made in the Kluane region.

The North-West Mounted Police followed closely behind the prospectors, setting up summer camps in canvas tents on Ruby Creek, Bullion Creek and Pine Creek in 1904. A permanent detachment was established at the outlet of Silver Creek where a small community, called Kluane or Silver City had sprung up. The NWMP barracks, a district mining office and a post office were among the buildings in the new community.

Silver City was also notable because it was the end of the road from Whitehorse. Further travel required getting on a boat and using the rivers. This is the way it remained all the way up until 1942 when the Alaska Highway pushed the road the rest of the way to Alaska. When i first moved up to Alaska in 2001 this portion of the highway, which took all day to travel, was still dirt. Today the road is much improved, but there are still some gravel sections.

As far as Silver City, half a dozen large buildings remain scattered among the trees. A Bed and Breakfast operates nearby, and also an arctic studies research station.

The Opera House

Somewhere in the Nevada desert, in the middle of nowhere, is the surreal vision of an opera house. When i arrived, i wasn't really sure where i was, but had come unexpectedly to an offset 4 way intersection, obviously designed in modern times to force me to stop after hours of freedom. Pulling over to check my map, i decided i might as well take a look at the strange place outside. It appeared to be a ghost town of modern times, one from less than 100 years ago, and it appeared to have possibly been abandoned more than once.



Next to the road was a small neighborhood half hidden in tall bushes. Peering into some of the windows it was hard to tell if the homes were truly abandoned or if someone was currently living in them. Some clothes hung to dry inside one, cloths that didn't look old. I wondered if maybe passersby sometimes "camped" in the structures. Near one building i found an old dusty truck. The window was rolled down but there was almost no dust on the inside of the truck. The truck didn't even look like it would run. Very confusing.

At the end of the group of homes were two distinctly different, larger homes. One was an old wooden house in ruins but the other was a two story adobe structure with a car parked in front of it. The adobe house actually had a cool design to it, with tall narrow windows in the front. Although it was just after sunset, i could still make out something like half open royal blue curtains on the inside of the tall windows, which definitely gave off the impression that the building had an occupant inside. That made me wonder if i might be trespassing. I had no idea what kind of person would live in such a place, so i kind of avoided being in direct view of those tall windows.


At the back of the building, she found a hole in a door, where she could see inside..."Peering through the tiny hole, I had the distinct feeling that i was looking at the other half of myself. The building seemed to be saying...Take me...do something with me...I offer you life"

From the houses i was led to other abandoned structures, including a much larger building that looked like an old hotel. While i was walking all around this place there were no sounds whatsoever except for a occasional driver on the nearby highway, so it seemed almost eerie in the twilight, that at the back of the hotel there was a single room with an air conditioner running. That settled it for me. The front of the building finally revealed where i was, although things didn't seem any less strange in knowing.

House No. 1

I had wandered, at dusk, onto the Lost Highway, and the hotel was the actual Lost Highway Hotel, featured in the David Lynch movie of the same name. After being there, it is now a no brainer to me that Lynch would use it in a movie. It also was featured years earlier in the movie The Hitcher. According to some info i read, Rutger Hauer stayed an extra week after shooting to go rock hounding in the nearby mountains.

House No. 2

House No. 3

The town and hotel were originally built by The Pacific Coast Borax Company as their headquarters in 1925. They named the town Death Valley Junction, and it functioned for many years as a headquarters and employee barracks, but was pretty much a ghost town by the 1960's. During that decade a young woman, Marta Becket, and her husband arrived on the scene. Marta, a traveling dancer, was strangely drawn to the place. After finding the abandoned theater she decided right then and there that she wanted to stay for good and use the playhouse for her own shows. The couple rented the structure and renamed it the Amargosa Opera House. Amargosa was the original name for the area; it means bitter water in Payute.


House No. 4, the Big House

The couple soon began to put on shows three times a week unfailingly for many years, regardless of who showed up. During a wet spell when few, if any, people were attending the shows, Marta decided to paint her own audience on the walls of the theater so she could feel like she was performing for an audience even when no one came. It took a couple of years for her to create her fantasy audience, and i have to admit she did a good job.


The site was originally on a railroad. It looks like they have recycled some railroad ties to make this fence.

These events all happened many years ago, and to me the place seemed to be pretty much out of business, except for two black SUV's parked in front of that one room with the air conditioner running. At the time that seemed like some kind shady place to do very shady business, but weeks later, after i returned from my trip and got down to looking at pictures, i found a website for the hotel, describing the whole story. It was an old-skool website, so i still had my doubts about things but before writing this blog i looked it up again. The website has been completely changed. Apparently, Ms. Becket is still there today, the sole resident of Death Valley Junction, and i must have been looking directly at her house while i ignorantly wandered around.



Incredibly, Marta Becket is still putting on shows in her eighties. For more information about the opera house or to see "normal" pictures of the hotel you can go to the sight below, which is where the earlier picture caption i used about the door comes from:

Amargosa Opera House

An article with more detailed information than i can provide is here.

The Buckner Building

The Buckner Building is 273,660 square feet of dark, scary, flooded hallways. It used to house the entire town of Whittier, which was established in World War 2 as a secret military base. It had to be abandoned after suffering structural damage in the 1964 earthquake. So it's been abandoned for a long time but everyone who goes to Whittier sees it.

The building isn't fenced off or secured, so there isn't much to stop someone from entering, other than the frightening, filthy nature of what's inside. Maree decided to go explore it this summer with a friend one weekend. She came back with enough interesting pictures and stories that i decided i needed to check it out myself. So a few days later, during a rainy day, i decided to drive down and see what i could find, stepping slowly through half of the flooded floors, trying to avoid puncturing the rubber fishing waders i was wearing to keep my feet dry.

 

The building is huge. Six stories are above ground, with at least two  below ground levels, from what i hear. Every single window has been broken, and since Whittier is a rainforest, every floor is flooded under a few inches of water. All non metal/rock materials have decayed into a nasty rust colored type of mud/powder that seems to collect more on the lower levels. Even the concrete  is dissolving away and being redeposited as calcite cave formations.

This room is turning into a rookery. Notice the noose at the top of the picture. Neither of us noticed on our individual visits until we saw the photo. Failure to pay attention to your surroundings is undeniable proof of super natural activity.

The upper levels are not too scary, largely empty and sort of rinsed clean, relative to the rest of the floors. They have many very small rooms. It's hard to tell if the rooms were offices or dorm rooms. As you go down lower though, things start to get creepy and dark. These pictures that i took are from floors three through six. I was taking pictures in natural light and had no flashlight.

This is a scary open area in the central part of the building.

The building is divided into three sections that are not connected. Maybe they are expansion joints? I don't know what they are, but crossing from one section to the next involves stepping over an 10 inch gap in the floor. At these gaps you can see all the way down or up, left or right. At those points water is sometimes cascading down from floor to floor. The sound of water is everywhere, with occasional waterfalls pouring out of the ceiling.

The farther down you go the creepier and darker things become.

I ended up being in the place for nearly three hours before i got tired and hungry. Since i had no flashlight i was unable to visit the dark floors. I walked a little ways into the second floor, into an abandoned nightclub and restaurant. I had a video camera with nightvision but it didn't work well enough to tell what i was stepping on and what to avoid with my head at the same time.

At this point things began to look just like something from the Silent Hill games. I would never want to come here at night.

Nature is taking control. There was even a small tree or two in a couple of rooms.

Lower down, hidden in the dark, are a bowling alley, theater, even a prison. We saw some pictures somewhere of the prison in the basement, flooded under a foot or two of nasty water with rusty prison bars and open cages everywhere. It looked nuts. They say in winter bears will sometimes go to the basement to hibernate.

One of the wings that runs perpendicular to the length of the building. The second and first floors are mostly boarded up at the windows, and the first floor is additionally hidden behind a thick growth of trees and bushes.

Calcified gravel is fending off weird algae.

Below are some of the pictures Maree took of the lower levels where i couldn't go. She has this amazing feature on her camera called a flash. It's sad, but i've never bought a flash because i hate them.

A calcite column and stalactites in one of the dark lower floors. Here they have solidified an open door!

A great texture on a frightening elevator door.

A large hallway covered in something undefinable stretches into darkness.  This is just like the type of place where you'd have to fight the first boss in a survival horror game.

A few rows of seating in the theater.

 

The floor looks particularly disgusting in the theater. Some poor soul wandered in on a bike and was surely devoured by demons.

See the Buckner Building in Winter!         Buckner Building: The Winter Palace