What is your life and career outside of your interest in Titan bases?

At the time I first became involved with the Titan base, I was actually a defense contractor out in Colorado and I stayed on that job until 2004. The business plan for the Titan facility in Colorado turned out to be economically unfeasible. The place is a mess, environmentally from a health standpoint. We saw that the cleanup wouldn’t get done any time in the near future. The federal funds had been there, and there’s an annual clean up budget, however, there were many higher priorities so we couldn’t count on those dollars.  In fact, an emergency came up in Colorado somewhere around 2002-2003 and they had to spend a pretty serious amount of money to fix it– over 200% of their annual budget in fact. Then the site in Colorado was sold. Along the same lines, we started a similar project out in Iowa, the idea was a secure data center.  We are now is inside of an old government communications bunker providing highly secure and reliable co-location.  Our company is InfoBunker (www.infobunker.com) and we provide secure location for people to protect their servers and data.

What first struck your interest in the Titan 1 in particular? How did your introduction transpire?

It’s probably easy to see such a place as interesting but when I moved out to Colorado around 1993, the first six months I was out there, somebody took me to one of the sites. He had been there once before and had taken some pictures, but he didn’t really have much in the way of technical information. He simply knew they were there. We went wandering through the complex for several hours and I was amazed at the scale. For a number of years after that nothing really came of it.  Later, around 1998, I mentioned this to someone else who became very interested in the sites and they found out that there weren’t just sites in Colorado and there were actually 18 of them altogether. He actually had a business plan in mind around the purchase of one of those sites and that’s how I got my access to that facility.  I turned out to be a sort of caretaker for the place.

How did the game map project start, and what was involved in it?

About 1998 the original Half-Life game came out and it came with game mapping software which allowed you to create your own levels. That was my first foray into everything.  I had trouble getting used to the mapping software and it was very easy to make it upset such that things didn’t work. About the same time another game came out called Unreal Tournament, which used a different editor, and it was slightly friendlier than the editor for Half-Life.  I had a big set of blueprints for the Titan base and I thought I could somehow translate these things into a game map– a sort of virtual Titan walk through. I looked into using CAD software, but it either came in a really limited student version, or you had a pay a bloody fortune for it. We were actually using professional CAD software where I was working called AutoDesk, the cost of which is astronomical – that wasn’t an option either.

What sort of time commitment did the game mapping work involve?

It was spread out over a period of about six months. I would spend an hour or two working in the evenings. I’m pretty sure I spent well over a hundred hours. It was really hard to fix things that went wrong in the editing software so I spent a lot of time re-working problems caused by my inexperience with it. Because of the Titan’s size it would become a performance issue in the game editor. It would run slowly sometimes going into the longer tunnels where there was a lot of rendering to be done.  The more you can see at once, the harder the CPU has to work to draw it. Going into the power house was a bit laggy. The files themselves were around 9 MB.

On your web site, you describe finding a Dash-1 in one of your early trips into the Titan base. What was it like finding these documents and what did they contain?

I was ecstatic when I found the Dash-1. We were just about ready to leave and I started digging through this pile of junk. It was bits of insulation and bits of scrap steel. As I dug down into the junk pile I found a stack of papers several inches thick. I had seen a scanned copy of a Dash-1 before, but to find one sitting there was something else. The more I dug the more I found – we probably found a good 120 lbs. of documents in there. A lot of it was parts lists and schematics of the guidance and communications systems and were very technically dense. Two interesting documents covered cleaning and maintenance of the facilities and launch consoles. They included the functions of the various buttons on the consoles itself and had a nice fold-out illustrations of the entire console panels. Any documents that were classified – that they (the Air Force) really cared about, went out the door with them, but these other documents were basically user’s manuals — or how-to maintenance guides, and parts lists. If any of the airmen had an interest in them, they would take some of the docs with them when the sites closed. I know some guys who had a collection of stuff from their career as a missile crew member. Typically a lot of these documents were destroyed by the Airforce as a matter of policy or simply thrown away. A lot of the ones I saw down there I haven’t seen anywhere else. Probably the only people that would have them would be the Air Force or the people who worked in those facilities.

There’s a very gripping narrative of your experience climbing to the top of an actual Silo. What was it like?

I can’t say that I wouldn’t do that again. After a while you kind of forget how scary something was and curiosity sets in again. It was insane but I just had to see it while I had the opportunity. It was probably one of the more frightening things I’ve experienced outside of being in a serious car accident. It took me about 30 minutes to make the ascent to the top but the descent was the worst of it. Part of that was working my way from the entrance to the silo. I had to work my way around the perimeter out to the liquid oxygen (LOX) tunnel. Once I got there, there were a lot of obstacles sticking out of the wall. There’s a very large water pipe for the fire suppression system which is an 18-inch conduit.  I had to get past that pipe going up and back down.  Imagine standing on a ledge in the dark that sticks out 18 inches over a very long drop and you can’t see any footholds below so you have to blindly lower yourself over the edge and hope you find something to step on so you can get down safely.

Have you spoken to past airmen? what were their recollections of the journey?

I did in fact speak with one person – there was a retired colonel and I think he worked out at one of the Washington sites. His name was Charles Simpson he was actually head of the AAFM:  the association of air force missiliers (http://www.afmissileers.org/). I asked him all kinds of questions like what was was it like to be down in one of these facilities – One of the things I was really curious was the power dome.  What was it like inside one of these massive domes when the site was in operation – he said, “It was very very loud.”

Editor’s Note: Enjoy this final installment of the history of the Greek Orthodox era at Byron Hot Springs.  Much of the research material could be found at the Bancroft Library. You may visit the entire set of photos here.

Byron was not the first to play up the symbolic healing properties of its waters. The belief in waters carries its own cultural baggage, dating all the way back to pre-classical times. The Egyptians believed in the life-giving aspects of the Nile. Their symbol for the Nile was the lion’s head. Not surprisingly Byron included lion head fountains in their advertisements.

An advertisement possibly dating from the early 1900s before fire destroyed the second hotel at Byron Hotel. Note the two lion’s head figures – symbolic images used in Ancient Egypt to represent life-giving water.

Specific to the Christian theology was the spring of Jerusalem, which fed into the two pools of Bethesda. These “life-giving” springs as they were known also cleansed sheep before being sacrificed to God. But, in John 5, their healing purpose was revealed: “In these lay a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water; for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and troubled the water; whoever stepped in first after the troubling of the water was healed of whatever disease he had.” The fifth chapter of John goes on to describe the parable of Jesus’ healing of the lame man at the pool. In chapter 9, Jesus heals a blind man in the nearby Pool of Siloam.

The caption reads: This stone is part of one of the columns of the balustrade that surrounded the ancient pool of Bethesda (5 John V.21) Brought from Jerusalem by Bishop Gailor, June 1, 1928. Image by Gary Bridgman, creative commons, 2.0.

The pools of Siloam and Bethesda served as a vital image in Catholic theology. In 1916, Hot Springs National Park was formed as a national healing retreat, but not before modern Pentecostalism was founded there at a 1914 convention in the same spot (Faupel). As Dr. Miranda Green aptly says: if water is anything in religion, it is a cleansing healer. Healing is closely linked with purification… The same perceptions caused water to become an integral part of Christian symbolism, an association which has manifested itself very clearly in the veneration of holy wells.”

If any religion venerated water, it was the Greek Orthodox church — and especially spring water. The central reason for this was because of the fact that “Orthodox teaching implicitly denies justification by faith alone by asserting the necessity of the sacramental rites for justification, regeneration or salvation.”

The sacramental rites of the Greek Orthodox church are also known as the seven holy mysteries. Amongst the seven, baptism is the linchpin. According to Chrysostom, “It is through baptism that we received remission of sins, sanctification, communion of the spirit, adoption, and life eternal.” Even more important to note is that, unlike Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox church does not limit sacraments. Anything, from a pomegranate tree to a pillar with a cross, to a hot spring, could be imbued with a sacred, salvatory status.

Sobriety Movement, Cleansing of Sins at Bryon Hot Springs

At Byron, even before the Greek Orthodox occupation of the site, the water’s healing properties go beyond a simple holistic, physical approach. Advertisements for the springs and descriptions of the site regularly included religious allusions. At Byron, “a person could arrive on crutches and walk out completely revived” (Jensen 33). Letters written by previous visitors to the site frequently quoted biblical place-names and scriptures. Letters from visitors to other California springs called such springs a “balm in Gilead” and “pool of Siloam” (Aetna Springs 26,28). Others went so far to say that hot springs gave them a “new blood and new life” (their italics).

The irony of this photo from inside the hotel is apparent when one sees the symbol of Satanism in a building that once housed the virtuous Greek Orthodox Church.

The springs also served a second purpose, as a cleansing from the symbolic and literal “evils” of society. An oral interview by Sandra Kelly quotes John Moody, a past resident of the Byron area as saying, “There were old boys coming in from San Francisco, the drunkards, and they’d get sobered up, straightened up.”

In the Progressive era, this aligned the religiously motivated sobriety movement with the divine salvation offered by the Byron Springs. By 1946, when the Orthodox church looked into purchasing Byron, they no doubt were aware of the past cleansing properties of the waters. Perhaps, they even had read reports like the one mentioned in this 1903 summary: “The unnatural craving for liquor is removed by a general course at the Springs. The nervous system, which has become shattered by long indulgence of bacchanalian joys, returns to its normal condition, and with the aid of restored health, the patient finds himself able to cope with his former adversary” (Byron 7)

Looking out the window of the dining room at Byron Hotel. Note the water feature at bottom. This was the main fountain that greeted visitors as they entered the hotel.

In such a way, Byron had become a spiritual retreat, not only for healing, but also for escape from the trappings of urban life. It was a rural “temple on the hill,” isolated from any evil influences and modern distractions. It was nestled amongst an alkali flat, below the ironically named Diablo Mountain range, surrounded by symbolically evil place names and landscapes. Thus, when bishop Athemagoras I dedicated the property in 1948 as Mission St. Paul, he envisioned it as a spiritual escape, a bishop’s see, and the center for Greek Orthodox activity for the entire western United States. The vision was big, but the outcome not so.

In 1956, the property was sold, and the icons and equipment scattered to other churches across the West Coast. The grand Byron hotel reverted to a desolate, decaying vestige of the past. For forty years it sat, until in 2005 it suffered a fire and began to melt in the rain and elements. Fire seemed to claim victory over the waters once again — the Victorian cottages burned. Only a few remnants of the spring headwaters remain, and ocassionally a religiously motivated element of the landscape appears in the most unlikely of places

An abandoned grave site at Byron Hot Springs Resort. This photo is an orphan work, and I am not aware of who took the photo, nor am I aware of where exactly the grave is in the Byron Complex.

Further Research

• “Aetna Springs, Pope Valley, Napa County, California, The” Napa City: Napa County Reporter, 1879.
• “Byron Hot Springs, California.” San Francisco: G. Spaulding & Co., 1903. 32 pages illus. incl. plans
• Faulkner, William B. “Faulkner’s Handbook and Directory of Murray Township, Alameda County, Cal.” Livermore: The Livermore Herald Steam Printing House, 1886.
• Kelly, Sandra. “Unpublished, Taped Interview with John G. Moody.” April 25, 1977. Available from the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
• Saucy, Robert L., John Coe, and Alan W. Gomes “Eastern Orthodox Teachings in Comparison with the Doctrinal Position of Biola University.” Biola University, May 1998. < http://faculty.biola.edu/alang/EO/Summary.pdf >
• Jensen, Carol A. “Byron Hot Springs.” San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2006.
• Faupel, D. William. “The Restoration Vision in Pentecostalism.” Christian Century. October 17, 1990. < http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=818 >
• Green, Miranda. “The Religious Symbolism of Llyn Cerrig Bach and Other Early Sacred Water Sites.” January, 2000. < http://people.bath.ac.uk/liskmj/living-spring/sourcearchive/ns1/ns1mg1.htm >.

Editor’s Note: The sparsely populated area of Byron has been host to scores of photographers over the past five years.  It is a place of great fascination for anyone who is privileged to see it in person. Yet few know of the history of the springs and their significance.  This two-part series will explore the religious history of a famous site East of San Francisco. Although the religious portion of its history is such a small part of its amazing saga, I hope it will help you better understand this unique landscape.  All modern photos are taken by me. The black and white images were retrieved from the Bancroft Library of U.C. Berkeley. Please stay tuned for Part 2!

The symbolic meanings of springs are undeniable. From ancient times, to antiquity, to the Romantic era, and even the beginning of the 20th century — in all of these times, springs were given as restorative sources of “curative powers.” Just as Moses tapped his rod on bare rock and quenched the thirst of Israelites, so too did William Mulholland turn the spigot at the Cascades to provide a figurative “spring” for a thirsty throng of Angelinos in California. “Here it is,” Mulholland said. “Take it.”

The aim of this overview is to focus specifically on the religious connotations of a localized collection of springs for the Greek Orthodox Church. Though the period of the Orthodox’s presence at Byron Hot Springs is from 1946-1956, Byron still served as a spiritual pilgrimage point as far back as the pre-Spanish era of California.

Byron reached its height in the early-1900s, declined during the Great Depression, served as a temporary top secret military prison camp, and then finally became consecrated for the Greek Orthodox Church. Much of my analysis will involve sources from the resort’s pre-Orthodox era; however, the sources and quotations drawn from this era further solidify the symbolic definition of the site and will lead credence to its selection as a religious pilgrimage point that suited the needs of the Church perfectly. The following claims will be drawn from a variety of primary sources and will be divided into two thematic headings. Visual evidence will be cited with a link to its corresponding item.

Architectural Embellishments and Landscape Design

As one enters the landscape of Byron, it becomes an obvious natural oasis in a grassy, alkali and sagebrush-covered landscape. The plot has seen three different hotels, two of which burned down — the third, and current hotel, is made entirely of brick. Fire hydrants surround the edifice — a testament to the architects getting smart to fire hazards.

Around the hotel are the vestiges of the past Edenic garden that surrounded Byron. The architect spared no expense in turning the land into a lush landscape reminiscent of a Mediterranean retreat. He ensured that the alkali dirt would not hinder the garden’s progress by trucking in tons of soil. Non-native Indian pepper trees, pomegranate, and palm trees dot the landscape. Of course, the springs themselves, the very centerpieces of this retreat, required an effort no less exorbitant. Originally, these places were simple watering holes, embellished with hand-carved stones that resemble the natural landscape. In its early Era, the springs were an undeniable Romantic-era notion of beauty.

But hidden beneath the symbolic surface of these Romantic-era creations are a number of religious and spiritual undertones. The extent to which these features of the Byron landscape played into the Greek Orthodox church’s purchase of the site may not be readily apparent, but my intention is to highlight the very real elements that may have made it a desirable site for the Church and its activities.

I had earlier noted the Mediterranean influence of the landscaping. Pomegranate, pepper, and palm dominated the landscape — all three very much reminiscent of the Greek Orthodox’s own Mediterranean mecca. The Greek Orthodox Church was — and still is, to a large degree — very much a new immigrant denomination. Its members during the Church’s purchase of Byron were overwhelmingly first-generation Americans who carried their own affinities for the flora of their homeland.

Beyond the ecological aspects of the site, the human-built aspects also had their own symbolic connotations. The dining area contains its own subtle, subliminal icons. Note the cross-like woodwork, integrated in the pillars. Also note the early image of people drinking from the Liver and Kidney springs — in an eerie, foreboding of this site’s future religious purpose you can see a faint shadow of a cross above the woman’s Progressive-era sun umbrella.

Perhaps most striking, however, is the now-demolished Liver and Kidney Spring structure. On top of this spring, the widow of the early proprietor of Byron built a memorial to her husband. The Mead Memorial was “long, spacious, cool, and light-filled. It held a combination medical room, sanctuary, and baptismal quality for its visitors. The concept of ‘drinking at the well’ had religious overtones to some.

Jensen goes on to write in her caption for this image, “Perhaps for this reason, the Greek Orthodox church sanctified the building into the ‘life-giving spring’ during the resort’s tenure as Mission St. Paul” (Jensen 40).

The “Zothohou Peeyee” — a moniker given to the Liver and Kidney Spring when the Orthodox Church dedicated the resort as their own — was not only religious, but it also featured seemingly secular paintings akin to John Constable, Thomas Cole, and Thomas Moran. Even these paintings, which included mountains, valleys, and streams, all had their own transcendentalist religious notions. The Church added to this ambience by placing their own altar and religious icon.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the craftsman-style cottages that adjoined the main hotel, built more than six decades before the church bought the resort. Though the craftsman style is generally not aligned with religious use, the cottages at Byron had something that set them apart as peculiarly religious: stained glass windows in the verandas, a common theme among Greek Orthodox cathedrals and churches — undoubtedly an influential quirk that the church may have found familiar.

Next week we’ll conclude this two-part series with a wrapup of the other religious artefacts of Byron. I hope this first part was enjoyable and please feel free to comment with your own input!