Several weekends back, we returned, yet again, to Monte Ne and brought my family along.

Hiccup and I headed down from Springfield that day to my mother's house, where she and my stepfather, brother, and uncle loaded up and followed us down to Monte Ne. My mom had seen Monte Ne on KY3 and decided she wanted to see it. She even claimed that she'd be willing to climb up the tower, but I knew beforehand that she was full of it.

When we arrived at Monte Ne, the first thing I noticed was that there were WAY more people than the other times we had visited. There were cars everywhere down by the amphitheater. It shouldn't have been surprising since it wasn't long after the Monte Ne story had aired, but it was.

We walked down to the amphitheater and checked it out. The water level had dropped about another two feet since the last time Hiccup and I had been there, so there was lots more exposed. I was pretty sure I could see one of the underground chambers in the amphitheater just under the surface.

After that, we drove over to the tower, which was also crawling with people. We walked down along the servants' quarters beneath Oklahoma Row and checked them out first, then headed up to the tower. As I expected, no one except my brother was willing to climb it. Since he's about as good of a climber as I am, we both just skipped hauling out my ladder and climbed right on up to the roof. While we were doing that, everyone else walked through the trees and down the shore to check out the rest of the old foundations.

Like other times, people saw us climbing the tower and decided they wanted to try it, too. Some of them gave up, but some of them made it to the second or third floors. No one besides my brother and I were dumb enough to climb to the roof, though.

Back on the ground, when my family got back, they decided they were ready to head out. I asked Hiccup if she minded if we stayed and I let some of those people attempting to climb the tower use my cable ladder to get the roof. She didn't mind, so I got the ladder out of the trunk while my family started driving home. I put the ladder in a backpack so I could get it up to the roof easier and started going.

Right away, I noticed something. Climbing the tower might've been easy normally, but it wasn't so easy carrying a heavy, stuffed backpack while doing it. Despite that, I got up to roof and hooked it up, and a couple people who had wanted to were able to get to the roof and join me.

While we were up there, someone on the third floor wanted to use it to bring their kids up from the second floor, so I lowered it down. Which meant I had to climb back down and bring it up again, so the people on the roof could get back down. Doing that last pullup to get up on the roof, while wearing the backpack, was even harder the second time around.

Eventually, when everyone who had wanted to see it had come up, we all headed back down. Some people used my ladder, while some simply climbed back down. But everyone got down there one way or another.

Down on the ground, I chatted for a bit with one of the guys who I'd helped up and made some caving plans. We exchanged contact information and I told him about the website. After he left, a couple who had overheard me talking about the site approached me wanting to know if my site had information about Monte Ne. I told them it had some, but it had some links to sites with more information than mine. They seemed pretty interested, so I gave them a sticker.

When we were done chatting with all our new friends, Hiccup and I headed back to the car and started driving back to Springfield.

Several weekends back, we had a huge day of exploring in St. Louis.

Hiccup and I got up early that morning and started loading up the car with gear. It was ridiculously cold that day, so we made sure to put on lots of layers, including thermals. When that was all done, we started heading up to St. Louis, although we got delayed when I had to pull over at a gas station to fix my heater when it stopped working.

We met up with the St. Louis guys at a parking lot outside of the city. Tunajive, Chris, and Memory_machine were all already there when we got there. We got out and did the introductions, since we'd never met, and started talking about what we wanted to see first. We ended up settling on Armour Meat, so I gave the guys one of my two-way radios to stay in contact between our vehicles, and we started driving out that way.

To get to Armour Meat we had to go over the river into East St. Louis. I was pretty sure I'd driven through the area before, but it had been years. I was amazed at all the abandoned structures. East St. Louis looked like an explorer's paradise.

We pulled in at Armour Meat, passing by a huge set of hollow buildings that the guys told us were used to house cattle. We parked back behind the building and got out of the cars. The place was unbelievable. It dwarfed any abandoned building in the Springfield area, and it was falling apart at the seams. I was in love.

We started checking out the place, passing by the remains of a small four story building on our left. The entire bottom floor was gone, so there was no way to get to the upper floors without climbing. There didn't appear to be anything worth seeing inside of it, though, so we kept on moving.

There was a gap between to the two main buildings of Armour, and we slipped inside one of the buildings there. We found ourselves in some mostly-empty floors, although the walls and ceiling were crumbling in places. There were even soda straw stalactites dangling from above.

From there, we passed through several collapsed areas until we were able to head up to one of the higher floors. They were mostly the same as the floors below them, although crumbling worse and there was more junk and equipment inside of them. There were also places where there were openings in the floor where equipment or silos had apparently gone between levels.

Around the third or fourth floor, I had a minor accident. An entire corner of the building had collapsed and fallen off, leaving nothing but jagged wooden beams hanging in every direction. I headed out on the edge to get a better picture of the collapse, and as I was walking back into the building, I cracked my head on the point of a jagged wooden beam.

I hadn't hit my head that hard, at least not any harder than the million other times I'd cracked my head while exploring. But I began to notice this warm sensation on my forehead, and as I leaned over, I noticed blood dripping off of my nose onto the ground.

Apparently, I had stabbed myself on the point of that beam. I wasn't hurt, but I was pretty embarassed. An hour of meeting these guys and I had managed to cover the front of my face with blood. I posed for some pictures and assured them I was totally fine to continue exploring. It had stopped bleeding in about a minute anyway. Tunajive gave me the liner of his glove to wipe the blood off, and we were good to go.

Up on yet another floor, we came across an area where there had obviously been livestock. The floor was covered in either mud, manure, or feed. After all these years, it was pretty hard to tell which. But the floor was also littered with light fixtures and other junk. There was also some kind of chute where the animals were herded into line, possibly to be slaughtered or something.

Here, there was a set of stairs that led to a wooden catwalk system that was above the entire floor. Some of the boards were still okay, but some were obviously not, so we had to watch our step pretty closely here. There was a place where I could've walked across some of the catwalk and gone out a window onto a section of roof, but it didn't seem like the smartest thing to do. Besides, there didn't seem to be much on that section of roof, and the guys said there was plenty more to explore.

We came to another section of floor where there was debris everywhere. Also, the floor had buckled and actually collapsed in places. This area was also part of the same corner that had collapsed where I struck my head, so I got to take another look at that from above. On one side of the building, there was also some sort of equipment that went up two floors that most of us climbed up and around on. The floor was pretty unstable, though, so we had to be especially careful.

Here, in the corner, I found a ladder that went up to the roof. I went on up and when I saw that the floor up there was sturdy enough to walk on in places, I started checking it out. There wasn't much to see, and I was limited in where I felt it was safe to walk, but it was still cool. There was a building up there full of old junk, including the equipment that ran the elevator.

From there, we went back down the stairs to the bottom floor, then headed into the second huge building of Armour Meat. When we walked inside this one, I was in awe. The ceiling was about three stories high, and the room was full of what appeared to be generators as well as huge pipes. It was incredibly cool, and Tunajive and Memory_machine posed for some pictures on one of the generators.

In the back of the room, one of the two huge smokestacks at Amour came down through the ceiling to the ground. There was no way into the smokestack, but there was a ladder going up the side of it all the way to the top. I thought about trying it, but the guys said I could get to the ladder from the roof, too, so I decided to wait.

We passed through a few more large collapsing rooms after that, until we reached the one with the second smokestack. Here, the guys had dug through the dirt enough that we could crawl into the smokestack. Inside, the view was pretty amazing. There was a ladder that went up the inside of the smokestack, but after climbing up a few rungs, we decided it didn't seem safe enough. The rungs felt like they were about to come right out of the brickwork, anyway.

We went through several more floors and rooms after that. Some were filled with equipment and debris, while some were mostly clean. Some were also below ground while some led up toward the ceiling. We even found ourselves standing on a catwalk above a gigantic coal bin at one point.

Eventually, we went through some kind of employee locker room and reached the roof, which was in surprisingly good shape. There were glass structures up there that had been smashed up pretty good, though. We spent a while walking around it, checking out the view and watching some guy salvaging stuff from a nearby building. Memory_machine and I debated about climbing a ladder on one of the smokestacks for a while, but we ultimately decided it just wasn't safe enough. I was determined to come back next time with some kind of harness system that would let us do it, though.

After that, we headed down through a hole in the floor of the roof into another employee area. Because the staircase had been removed or collapsed, it was the only way down there. While climbing into that section, I knocked a piece of concrete loose with my ass, which struck Tunajive in the nose and cut him pretty good. Now there were two of us with blood running down our faces.

There were lockers and bathrooms and general office stuff down there, but that was about it. The area was fairly big, though, and we spent a little time wandering around down there. When we were finished, we climbed back out of the hole and started making our way out of Armour Meat.

Back at our cars, we decided where we were going to eat lunch, since we'd been at Amour for hours. We stopped once outside the entrance so I could get some exterior shots, then we headed back into St. Louis to get some hot dogs from Gus' Pretzels. I'd never heard of the place, but they serve hot dogs and bratwurst cooked inside of a large chewy pretzel. I was extremely impressed.

When we were fed, we headed over to Falstaff Brewery. We snuck inside into a courtyard-type area, and the guys immediately led us down into the cave system that had once been used for brewing lager beer back before refrigeration. The walls had all been finished up with brick arches, so it didn't much resemble a cave anymore.

There wasn't much left down there that indicated it had ever been used for brewing beer, although there were one large tank that was some sort of boiler or distiller or something. There was also some large racks that had been used for some unknown purpose. Plus, most of the cave was flooded with a few feet of water, so we were only able to walk around the upper levels and raised areas, although I had already decided I wanted to go get my waders.

After that, we started checking out the actual buildings that comprised the brewery. From the outside, the place hadn't looked that extensive, but that wasn't the case at all. The place was made of several buildings, all at least a few stories, with all kinds of old brewing equipment left inside. We began thoroughly inspecting each one and then moving on to the next.

The first building we checked out ended up being one of the most decaying. Portions of the floor and ceiling had simply collapsed inside, and there was an ornate staircase with rungs missing that was rusting away. In many place we were afraid to walk because the floor might give way. There was plenty of old equipment and junk left in there, too, and what appeared to be some old generators. And there were big, round holes that went between floors, where there'd apparently been some kind of tanks or silos. There were even some random catwalks in places.

In this building, or one connected to it (it was hard to tell where they began and ended), we came into a large room piled full of junk. Here, there were several cans of unopened Civil Defense survival biscuits dated from the early sixties. The guys told us that there was a recently-opened can in one of the other buildings, and that they'd tasted them. Chris said they tasted pretty nasty.

In most of the buildings, we found huge vats and tanks. Some seemed to be for mixing up things, others seemed to be for fermentation. Some of them actually still smelled of beer. Even some of the roofs had these large tanks on top of them. Personally, I enjoyed crawling inside of them and making yelping sounds.

In one building, the guys led us to a room that they dubbed the Beer Chapel. It was a strange section of the building where a hallway and a room had been finished with white tile. In the room, there were ornate glass windows, and the room actually did resemble a chapel. There was a hole here where we were able to climb out on a section of the roof as well. The view was pretty awesome, but the roof had unstable bounce to it that was a little unsettling.

The next few areas we went to were mostly empty, except that they contained a few random pieces of modern-looking equipment with the Falstaff logo on them. But this area led into a strange room with a vaulted, ornate ceiling and wood-paneled walls. It looked like it might have been a lobby or something, but there was an small bar in one corner. Maybe an area to sample the beer or something?

Next, we ended up in an outside area that hadn't originally been outside. All that was left was a steel beam shell where a building had once been. It looked as if it might have been demolished, because none of the walls or ceiling were on the ground. But it was strange, because it was surrounded by structures that were still standing, so no one could've gotten heavy equipment in there.

In the building directly next to that, we found something interesting. The floor was covered in piles and piles of old paperwork, including hundreds of old Falstaff stock certificates. They had lots of different denominations, all with the owners' names still on them. It seemed weird that something like that would've been abandoned.

Next to there, we found a room with several large, horizontal tanks, a few of which were open on one end. They looked like they had been in the process of being dismantled or repaired or something. We spent a little time inside some of the open ones, because the floor was slick and you could practically ice skate on the surface.

At some point, we went down below ground level and headed through a tunnel that went to the building across the street. This building was newer and contained more modern brewing equipment. It was all finished up with nice tile and had large brewing chambers built into the walls that you had to enter via ladders. You could still smell the beer down inside of them as well.

Truth be told, we only explored the lower two floors of the more modern building. The guys had informed us that the upper floors were a hundred percent identical to the ones below them. Since the lower floors were kind of plain to begin with and since we'd already spent a long time exploring the surprisingly vast brewery buildings, we decided to skip the upper floors of that building.

We had some time to kill after that while we waiting for one of Tunajive's friends to meet up with us. I asked if anyone minded if I ran and got my waders from my car and checked out the flooded brewery cave that we'd checked out earlier. No one seemed to mind, so I ran back and got them out of my trunk.

I strapped myself into the waders, lowered myself down into the water, and started checking out the cave. Really, if you hadn't known it was a cave, you wouldn't have been able to tell. The walls were completely finished up with brick. Also, it was unbelievably moist and warm down there, and my camera fogged up immediately. I had to keep wiping the lens and immediately taking a shot just to get any pictures.

At the back of the first room of the cave, there was a small square hole in the wall that seemed to have natural rock behind it. When I told the guys about it later, they identified it as a spring box that had once been used by the brewery. Also back there was a place where the ceiling stretched up two stories to the floor of one of the buildings.

I went through a crack in the wall here to another chamber that was pretty much identical. All of it was empty except for some random trash floating in the water. The water did have a strange green color to it, though.

A tunnel in that room led into another chamber that was actually underneath the room we'd found earlier with the racks. I started to walk into it and stepped into a deep hole that went up to the top of my waders. I could tell it got deeper and I almost didn't try to explore it. However, I noticed a raised area on the floor that went along the wall, and I was able to walk back into it on that. Even then, the water was almost too high.

Back toward the ledge where I lowered myself into the water, we found something really strange. There was a small opening that led into a room under the stairs that led down into the cave. This woom was flooded as well, but it had a wooden floor that was broken in places and had a square hole in it. I could see through the hole that it went down another ten feet or so into what appeared to be a chamber with actual rock walls. Because I was afraid to walk out on the wood, I couldn't see just how big or extensive the chamber was, but I suspected it was some of the cave that hadn't been finished up. But since I didn't have scuba gear, we weren't going to be finding out the details.

With that, we were done with Falstaff and headed back to the cars to drive over to meet Tunajive's friend. I'd love to tell you about the uber-cool thing we explored next, but alas, it's once again one of those sensitive places that would get me in trouble if I talked about it. However, rest assured that it was REALLY awesome, and you'd all be sufficiently jealous if you knew what it was.

And when we were through with that, Hiccup and I made the long, sleepy drive back to Springfield.

Several weekends back, we returned to Rush, Arkansas to check out some more mines that the Arkansas guys had found.

Hiccup and I got up early that morning and headed down into Arkansas, where we once again met the Arkansas guys at a supermarket in Yellville. This time, though, it was just Firediver and Korb there to explore with us. We went ahead and followed them down to Rush, where we parked at the campground.

The first thing we did when we got there was to strap on our chest-high waders. The mine was across the river, and it was going to be the easiest way to get over there. And since it was fairly cold out that day, there was no way we were wading across it without them.

Once across, we ditched our waders and put our shoes back on, then started heading up the hill. We passed some concrete structures on the way, as well as a large pile of spoils, before coming up to the entrance of a fairly gigantic mine.

We climbed over the boulders and rubble in and around the entrance and went inside. The mine was large inside and fairly uneven, with the floor sloping up and down periodically. There was lots of rotting wood scattered about, as well as support beams still standing in places. There was also an old ore cart, some pieces of cart track, and flat places of piled rock made into small "roads" that had apparently been for ore track.

Although it would've been hard to get lost in there despite its size, someone had arranged pieces of wood into arrows throughout the mine. Most of the tunnels were big enough to drive an SUV through, and they snaked around randomly and branched off constantly. It wasn't that confusing to navigate them, but it did take a while to poke around in every little side tunnel to see where they led, which was always to an eventual dead end.

Before long, we made it to the other side of the mine, where another set of entrances led outside. In this area, the ceiling was extremely high, with huge dug out places in the ground. I joked that this would've been an awesome place for a rope swing, and it really would've been.

We went out and started walking along the river, heading toward another mine that the guys had seen but hadn't been able to check out last time. While we were walking, I kept running up the hill or down it to check out what might be caves or mines. It wasn't long before I had left everyone behind, although I didn't realize how far behind, and I felt bad when I realized I'd let Hiccup fall back to the rear.

I found the mine the guys had seen and stopped there to wait. It was just a pit that went straight down about thirty or forty feet. It was hard to see if it went anywhere else at the bottom, because it was sloped around the edges of the pit and that made it impossible to lean over and look down.

Korb and Hiccup caught up with me at the mine while Firediver waited up the hill for us. Korb had a rope, and I was extremely tempted to try and go down into the pit with it. If the rope had been long enough, I was sure I could've made it, but we weren't positive it was long enough. In the end, we just went on walking.

We followed the river for quite a while, but the ground leveled out and didn't seem to have any mines. We did, however, find a collapsed barn that we checked out. And when we decided to turn around and go back the way we'd come, we found another smaller pit mine that I was able to crawl down inside. There were two small chambers at the bottom that you could crawl into, but they didn't really go anywhere.

When we were done there, we walked back down to our waders, waded across the river to our cars, and drove down to where the trails were to check out some of the mines in that area. There was one particular mine I wanted to check out, although I wasn't sure we'd find a way in. However, while we were looking around, one of the guys managed to find a way in to a mine directly above it, and we went inside. We hoped that it would connect to the one I was wanting to get into.

This mine seemed to be a linear one, with one tunnel stretching back. But, just inside the entrance, it connected to another mine that was set lower in the hillside. So you ended up standing on a ledge about fifteen feet high looking down into the other mine, which was filled with a few feet of water. I had also wanted to get into that mine, and now that I had a way, I was determined to do it, but we needed to check out the one we were in first.

We headed inside, passing an old rock wall, and started checking out the mine. As we'd thought, it was one long stretch of tunnel, although there were two levels to the tunnel, with one set higher and off to the side. There was still ore cart track running the length of the lower level, as well as metal pipe.

At the end of the tunnel, we found a big area with a wooden platform where they'd apparently filled up the ore carts with rock. There was even an extremely large ore cart still half buried in the rubble. There was a small side tunnel there as well, but it didn't really go anywhere.

After that, we went back to the entrance area and I made a half-assed attempt to climb down into the second mine. However, it just wasn't do-able without a rope or ladder, so I decided I wanted to go back to my car and get my rope, my waders, and possibly my cable ladder as well. Korb and Firediver weren't too into it so they decided to head in for the day when we reached our vehicles, but I couldn't leave without seeing what was down there.

With the rope and waders in hand, Hiccup and I headed back to the mine. I tied the rope off to something secure and started going down. Because the ledge I was climbing against sloped inward in places, I kept having to walk from side to side against the wall to places where it didn't do that. Eventually, though, I reached the bottom and had Hiccup throw my waders down to me.

Inside the second mine, there was a large pool of water where the mine had flooded, with what appeared to be two partially submerged tunnels. I strapped myself into my waders and headed into the water. One of the tunnels turned out to not even be a tunnel, just a hollowed out area. The second one was definitely a tunnel, and I had to wade up to the very edge of my waders to check it out. Unfortunately, I could see that it was collapsed back inside, so it was a bust as well. I was still glad I had satisfied my curiosity, though.

I took a few pictures of the second mine while I was down there, then had Hiccup pull up my backpack and the box my waders were in. Then I started climbing back up the rope, which turned out to be slightly harder than going down had been. I had to have Hiccup move the rope from side to side for me so that I could climb around the concave areas in the ledge again, but I made it back up just fine.

With that, Hiccup and I headed back to the car with our gear and started back toward Springfield.