Off Limits (2011) s01e04 Episode Script
Arizona
So I'm gonna take this thing for a spin.
Where do you turn it on? Wheels up, we're going to Arizona.
It's a place where you can drown in the middle of the desert Wow! Look at that.
Space colonies are a reality Look at this.
This is not gonna be pretty if one of us falls.
And the wide-open landscape is hiding giant secrets.
It is so intense to imagine waiting for the end of the world.
This is Arizona There's been a lot of death around this.
"Off limits.
" In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world, hiding their amazing stories behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm Don Wildman.
And these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
Off Limits S01E04 Arizona You don't have to, uh, drive very far outside of Tucson to feel like you're in the middle of nowhere.
So this guy named drew sends me an e-mail last night with instructions, uh, to find his place at a certain distance from the road.
I will look up and find a little white chair.
I was told to park the car, march up to this place where I'd find a concrete slab with a white plastic chair.
And so here I am.
As it turns out, this is standard security protocol for accessing an abandoned nuclear missile site.
I'm on the outskirts of Tucson, waiting to see an underground silo that could have triggered world war III.
It's just another chapter in the long history of Arizona's beautiful but deadly countryside.
When you think of the wild west, you imagine the parched deserts and rugged mountains of Arizona.
Today, the bustling cities and breathtaking scenery lure millions of nature-loving tourists here.
But 150 years ago, this was a fierce battleground of apaches, soldiers, prospectors, and bandits.
But none of those dangers could compete with the death and destruction lurking beneath the ground in the 1960s, when 18 massive nuclear weapons were buried in the desert.
They were called the titan ii's, and they could destroy a city halfway around the world in the blink of an eye.
If you want to see what's left, you have to play by some pretty strange rules.
- Hello? Drew.
- Yeah? - Hello, don.
- How you doin'? Pretty good.
Keep the cameras facing down, please.
Oh, I'm sorry.
The military sold the silo to a salvage company in the '80s.
It changed hands again before drew bought it in 2008.
He plans to build a home on top of this ultimate basement shelter and wants to keep his name and the location hidden from would-be vandals.
So we're going in here? That's right.
And I'm gonna shut the doors behind us.
Okay.
You want to cut the cameras.
Cuthe cameras, okay.
All right, hello.
Hey, don.
All right, so we're inside, because this is the entrance.
This is the old entrance, the old elevator shaft that goes down 32 feet.
32 feet down is the cold war.
Yeah.
Oh, my goodness, right away, it all opens up.
After the site was decommissioned by the air force, it was filled in with dirt and concrete until drew came along.
So you dug this out yourself.
With my backhoe, I dug about 15 feet.
Then I had to get an excavator.
Once one of the most restricted spots on earth, it's now drew's property, and we can explore at will.
So that's the blast door there.
Yep.
6,000 pounds right there.
I mean, you can go ahead and push it.
Wow, that is heavy.
Beyond this door, the facility is considered hardened, meaning it's protected from all but a direct nuclear strike.
We've come 32 feet below the desert floor into a sprawling complex.
To one side is a tunnel that connects to the silo, where a giant, 103-foot titan ii was once fueled and ready to go.
In the other direction is the domed control center, a 3-story structure where a crew of 4 had their quarters.
Up to the living quarters? Crew's living quarters.
"Living" I don't know if that's the right word for this.
Yeah.
You know? They were Existing in a terrifying state.
Existing.
And this was the bedroom.
Okay.
There were two bunks in here.
Oh, man.
So there were four crew members that were living in here on 24-hour shifts.
That's right.
The first crew reported for duty soon after the Cuban missile crisis.
A few months later, j.
F.
K.
Was shot.
Many suspected his assassination was a Soviet plot, and a nuclear strike could be next.
With paranoia and fear running high, crews were given regular psychological testing to make sure they could handle the stress of a front-row seat at the end of the world.
Look at this the loudspeakers.
Uh, speakers.
It's happening.
Armageddon has occurred.
Yep.
They would be hearing their orders over this, right? Yeah.
Get downstairs quick.
One level below the crew quarters is the terrifying heart of the operation launch control.
This is where they launched.
Whew.
This is where one desk was with a launch control panel with a key that launched the missile.
Okay, so there's a whole console here right.
That two people are sitting at.
One person there, - one person here.
- One person over here, and this is where the key is turned Turned to launch.
And the buttons are pushed.
Launching required two men, and it would take less than five minutes to enter the codes and turn the keys to unleash a 9-megaton warhead.
The titan ii had a maximum range of 10,000 Miles, could reach moscow in 35 minutes, and was 600 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
I'm noticing that there are, all the way around the perimeter of this room, these huge Springs.
Eight of 'em.
Eight Springs.
Right.
And that's literally keeping this floor on a suspension.
Yeah, this takes the shock wave of a nuclear bomb blast.
Really? Okay.
The silos were a prime target for a Soviet counterstrike and could handle a 1-megaton blast within 2,200 feet.
I'm basically standing on a platform that's attached to the other two levels as a shock-absorption system.
And the whole purpose of that is to protect this this control center from the percussive effect of a nuclear bomb, either one they're firing off, or one that's actually struck outside.
It is so intense to imagine what these guys must have been thinking while they're sitting there, or not thinking, following orders, waiting for the moment when they turn the keys and fire off what is essentially, quite possibly the end of the world.
If the U.
S.
and Soviets had launched all their weapons, world war III would have taken about 45 minutes, killing hundreds of millions of people and blanketing the entire planet in nuclear fallout.
The titans were decommissioned in the 1980s, but today, there are over 500 even more powerful minuteman III missiles in their place.
So this is the tunnel that leads to the silo that holds the missile.
Exactly.
Drew tells me when this facility was shut down in 1984, the missile was removed, the silo was imploded, and the connecting tunnel filled with concrete.
I mean, they have sealed this one completely off with a concrete barrier.
Beyond this is a lot of dirt.
Just a few Miles from drew's place is the only titan silo left intact with a disarmed missile in place.
The military preserved it as a vital piece of history, and it's called "site 17.
" I'm meeting with Chuck penson, who literally wrote the book on these weapons of mass destruction.
How you doing, sir? Welcome to 1-7.
Thank you very much.
You're gonna hear a bell start to ring, and that's just a warning that the hatches are gonna close.
Okay.
- So this is all original? - Oh, yeah.
Nice.
Oh, man, look at that.
It just keeps getting scarier.
So this is what, in drew's silo, is all filled in.
You couldn't go past that wall.
This is the tunnel that was beyond that, leading to the silo that still exists.
Everything's intact in this facility.
Whoa.
And this is it.
This is the man, that is the missile.
That is the missile.
This is a pretty incredible, uh, moment.
I mean, this is what we this is what we're all so scared of, wasn't it? This is titan ii.
It's 103 feet tall.
- You can launch this in one minute.
- No kidding? Yeah.
Oh, my God, I I didn't even look down here.
Wow, look look at this.
All the way down how deep is this, chuck? It goes down to 150 feet.
I don't even know where to begin talking about this.
It's overwhelming that it it even exists, let alone, I mean, that we're able to see it.
And we had 54 of these at 1 time.
Each base cost, in today's, money about $95 million to build, and the 18 here in Arizona were a huge boon the local economy.
Oh, wow.
Isn't that a sight? That is insane.
That was the upside to having a weapon of mass destruction in your backyard.
The downside is obvious.
Look at that thing.
We are basically standing at the bottom of the military-industrial complex.
For 20 years, the titan ii silos were buried and forgotten in the desert sands, like ancient Egyptian tombs.
Some have been unearthed beneath churches and backyards, their secrets exposed.
But others remain hidden, maybe forever, somewhere in the Arizona wilderness.
I'm taking a very wary step back in time There's about a foot of bat crap.
Ugh.
To the birth of a hydroelectric revolution.
Oh, I have vertigo.
And I meet Arizona's baddest retirees.
That is a major, major plane, major.
Arizona isn't all beautiful desolation.
It's teeming with life.
Phoenix alone is home to over 1.
5 million residents, and that couldn't happen without the state's greatest hidden treasure water.
In the early 1900s, the idea of building a city even half the size of modern-day Phoenix smack in the middle of the desert would be unthinkable.
But there was one man with an incredible vision of what the west could be.
And fortunately for Phoenix, he had the political power to turn his vision into reality, because that man was the President of the United States.
Before Theodore Roosevelt was president, he was an adventurer, a hunter, and a rancher.
But in 1900,he knew the west couldn't stay wild for much longer.
He promoted bold land-management programs that would turn deserts into family farms.
Decades before the hoover dam was built on the state's border, Arizona was breaking ground in the salt river canyon on the most ambitious hydro project ever attempted in the U.
S.
Today, I'm heading 80 Miles northeast of Phoenix, following the salt river to a president's vision made concrete Theodore Roosevelt dam.
For security reasons, I can't show how I got up here.
Entry to the dam site is extremely restricted.
But I got an all-access pass from company spokesman James labar.
When was this dam built originally? This dam was originally built from 1903 to 1911.
It's over 100 years old.
I have been to the top of hoover dam, but that is no more inspiring than this.
I mean, this is where it really began, right? Yeah.
All the ideas that are encapsulated within hoover all started here.
Today, the dam helps power almost a million homes in Phoenix, but it was originally built to turn the desert into farmland.
In 1902,roosevelt signed the reclamation act into law, opening the floodgates on millions of dollars in loans to help reclaim arid land in the west.
The farmers down in the valley put their lands up for collateral to stabilize that loan to build this dam.
The land was ready.
It was fertile.
All it needed was a steady water supply.
Totally flies in the face that of Arizona being a dry state.
There's a lot of water here.
Yeah, there's a lot of water, 'cause there's been a lot of planning.
And that was the local farmers who made that happen.
They risked everything.
The farmers' gamble paid off, with the largest masonry dam to date in America.
It was 280 feet high and almost 200 feet thick at the base.
Oh, man, that is awesome.
Jeez! I have vertigo.
Back in 1911,the dam looked much different, with rows and rows of giant stone blocks slightly stepped back, almost like the walls of the great pyramid.
In the 1990s, it was sheathed in concrete and enlarged.
But the foundation is the same, and there's only one place to see it.
So we're going inside the dam here? Yeah, we're going right inside the dam.
And what we're gonna see here is just an amazing connection between the past and the present.
All right.
Here's the stone.
So this is a tunnel that was dug out of the Mountain here.
It runs right along the curvature of the dam.
This tunnel was part of the original structure and was engineered to combat a potentially catastrophic problem.
As water from the vast reservoir seeps into the bedrock, pressure builds up beneath the dam.
To release the pressure, hundreds of holes were drilled into the stone.
So are these these tubes that are coming out of the yeah, these are the tubes that are relieving the pressure.
How many of these tubes are there? Approximately 300.
300? Okay.
Oh, wow, this is really amazing.
That one's cold.
Look at that the minerals coming out of there have just built up.
So right here, we get the transition where we're going from the canyon wall to the dam.
Okay.
So this is the beginning of the dam right here.
Yeah.
You're no longer walking through a natural environment.
This is a man-made structure here.
This is all the masonry wall built of the stone that was quarried from the canyon around.
It was a massive building project in the middle of nowhere.
Crew members ranging from apache laborers to Italian marble workers had to build their own road to get here.
And to power heavy machinery out in the wilderness, they started generating their own electricity in 1909.
They sold the extra juice to neighboring towns like Phoenix.
And soon, the demand was so high, the generators were running around the clock.
Today, the dam built for farmers is part of the salt river project, the third largest power provider in the nation, and it all started in this transformer station.
Let's take a look in this building.
You've got to be careful of the bats.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay, so this is just an old office building now.
They redid it.
Yeah, and it's been abandoned for quite a number of years.
Can I get up here? Yeah, go for it.
All right.
Let's just take a look.
Okay, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of materials.
This is a really, uh, smelly and gross environment.
Look, so this is old Theodore Roosevelt dam, right, original transformer house.
Whoo.
First of all, beneath my feet there's about a foot of bat crap, just guano, and I don't want to breathe it in too much.
Look at this.
You can see all the old equipment, the old transformer equipment.
This is where power generated by the dam was boosted to higher wattage so it could make the 80-mile journey to Phoenix.
So this is not a very healthy environment, but it's a pretty cool way to see, you know, how things got started here.
Producing and selling electricity was the unforeseen and lucrative twist to Roosevelt's vision, and hydro power plants quickly spread throughout the west.
When Roosevelt dedicated this dam in 1911, he thought it would someday provide water for 100,000 people.
Today, it's serving up power, as well, to almost a million with water to spare.
So this is not a frequently accessed space, I assume.
No, not many people get to go down here.
Whenever we have to move water around the dam without going through the generator, we've got to move it through these big pipes.
Okay.
Man, that is a serious, serious outlet.
If this was open, what would be happening to us right now? We would be in the riverbed.
Okay, dead.
Dead.
Is there any way that we can see what happens? Can you lift these gates up? I think we can work that out for you.
No way.
Really? Yeah.
But we're not gonna be standing here while we do it.
You stand here.
I'll go open it up.
Each one of these pipes can move nearly 7500 gallons of water per second.
Today, we're just doing 40% of that.
Okay, just push it right now? That's good.
That's it? Okay.
Now I go over there? Whoa, there it goes.
Wow, listen to that! And look at this.
This is already vibrating.
That is how much water is coming through that pipe right underneath my feet.
Awesome! Man, you can just feel the power of the water.
All right, 40%! Cut it! Oh, I gotta see this water.
Oh, my lord, unbelievable! Wow! Look at that geyser of water.
Unbelievable! Now talk about an exhilarating, powerful sensation.
Here it comes.
Watch.
Go, baby, go! Yeah! That is amazing.
Hydroelectric power that's it.
I had no idea, until I saw it coming out of that pipe, how powerful sheer water can be.
You can feel the power here, literally.
Roosevelt understood that water was a mighty force for change, but even he had no idea it was powerful enough to change the face of a continent.
I did that.
Striking gold is tough It's like I'm panning for gold right here.
But hitting the mother lode is to die for.
70-some people have died.
What? In the old days, prospectors in Arizona's back country braved intense heat and cold-blooded killers, hoping to strike it rich.
Gold fever has a huge body count, and it's still claiming victims in the 21st century.
Most of us have a kind of romantic view of the gold rush.
A lone prospector stumbles on a big nugget of gold and becomes wildly rich overnight.
But the reality of gold mining was much darker.
Countless people died in a harsh wilderness.
Others were murdered over their claims.
Still others just went crazy in pursuit of this elusive yellow metal.
I'm at the base of the superstition mountains near the remains of a former boomtown, Goldfield.
In the 1890s, thousands of treasure hunters swarmed here, lured by several rich strikes and the legend of the lost dutchman mine.
If the stories are true, the ore from the dutchman is the richest in the world.
Hundreds have hunted for it, and dozens have died.
I'm meeting one of the last eyewitnesses to the madness.
Hello.
- Good morning.
- Good morning.
81-year-old Clay worst lives and works on the old wasp mine, a claim he believes is worth millions.
This was an open-pit mine that is at the end of its economic life.
Okay.
Clay's father was an Alaskan prospector, and he's carried on the family business here in Arizona.
So this is the pit here, huh? This is the pit.
There's big-time gold right in the bottom of that pit.
It gives me that little feeling of It's probably greed yep.
But it's exciting.
It looks like a desolate gully, but this trench has yielded almost a half a million dollars in gold.
I mean, as opposed to underground mining, where it's, like, the tunnel and the whole thing, this is open-pit mining.
That's what Clay's been doing here for 20,30 years.
Clay is still making a living by processing up to 6 tons of dirt per day a huge effort to produce 1/2 ounce of gold.
You're basically seeing prospecting gold prospecting as it was done way back when.
It's just a little more mechanized.
What's happening here, clay? There are riffles on the table Yeah? And a sheet of water.
That washes the lighter material off into the tailing side.
This is all about gravity.
The heavy element gold is gonna come out on the end.
I mean, we're basically looking at pieces of gold coming down here very small ones, but some more significant than others all floating down, getting shaken down into this, the fine cut right here.
There are several nice particles in here.
It's like I'm panning for gold right here.
Yep.
Man, I am hooked.
This is great.
Once he's collected enough gold dust, about two months' worth, Clay melts it down into a single bar of gold.
This is a small refinery and a met lab.
You gotta be careful how you pronounce that.
It is not a meth lab, it's a met lab I was gonna say Metallurgical laboratory.
This is amazing.
Well, it's kind of a nice little mad scientist laboratory.
Yeah.
It's like you're an alchemist back here.
Clay melts his gold dust in this tiny, but powerful furnace.
We've gotta go to 2,100, and we're only up to 1,982 now.
Okay.
So it's gonna be another 20 minutes well, in the meantime, take me through this legend of the lost dutchman mine.
What's the speculation on this legend? Oh, that thing is back there.
The lost dutchman there's absolutely no doubt about it.
The legend began in 1891 in Phoenix, when prospector Jacob waltz made a deathbed confession.
He had stumbled upon three Mexicans working, and he admitted that he killed them and took possession of the mine.
Waltz said that the mine, filled with rich gold ore worth millions, was hidden in the superstition mountains.
A deadly treasure hunt began that is still going on to this day.
There have been so many fatalities that many believe the mine is cursed.
So there's been a lot of death around this.
We think 70-some people have died.
What? In fact, three of 'em here in just the last year they just picked up three skeletons back there in the last month.
Back in the 1960s, we were averaging a homicide every 90 days for a while.
So these are serious, brutal murders.
One was Jim cravey, and this was in in 1947, and he had been beheaded.
To this day, no one has found the dutchman, but at least I get to see what inspired all the madness.
So we're gonna pour the gold bar right now.
Yep.
Here it comes.
Okay, here's your molten gold.
Wow, that is really neat.
Yep.
So you're looking at $20,000.
Get every last drop.
There it goes.
There it is.
And to think that we started with a pile of dirt yep.
And end up with pure gold.
Yep.
A lot of people, you you hand them the bar, and they know it's yours.
Almost got it.
Give me that.
Give me that.
Get it back from 'em.
Yeah.
She's beautiful.
Yeah.
Clay has to scratch for every ounce of this precious metal, but it puts food on the table and allows him to stay here near the elusive mine.
He hasn't been up in the mountains for years, but his mule is ready, just in case he finds a clue that finally solves the mystery of the dutchman.
You might think that the hard, sun-baked ground of Southern Arizona is only good for growing cactus.
But this killer dessert is also a surprising sanctuary, the final stop for war planes in the U.
S.
Arizona has about 350 days a year of brilliant sunshine, which makes it ideal for retirement after a long, hard career.
But that doesn't just apply to people.
Look.
Look at this.
On the other side of this fence, there are more than 4,000 military aircraft that have flown missions from Vietnam to Antarctica that are waiting to either be called back into service or to be scrapped for parts.
It's an amazing collection of multimillion-dollar machines that have served our country well for decades.
And you know what's really great? I get to go inside.
Just South of downtown Tucson, stretching over 2,600 acres, is amarg, the aerospace maintenance and regeneration group, nicknamed "the boneyard.
" Arizona's dry weather makes this the perfect place to preserve and repair a fleet too big to fit in hangars.
People come from all over the world to peek through the fence, but major Kathryn Roman is meeting me at the perimeter to escort me through the tight air force security, as long as we don't point our cameras at the checkpoint guard station.
It's kinda hard to wrap yourself around how big this place is.
I mean, pretty much to where we're almost to those mountains, right? - We're looking at airplanes.
- Yes.
The inventory out here is worth $27 billion, making the Smithsonian air and space museum look like a model shop.
You can find everything from Vietnam-era choppers to b-52 bombers and enough cargo planes to move a small city.
These aircraft, they're like giant warehouses - Okay.
- For parts.
They're not gonna fly anymore, but what we'll use them for is parts harvesting.
The newest addition is the largest aircraft in the U.
S.
fleet, the c-5a.
Ma that's a big plane.
That is a major, major plane, major.
It is.
It's our largest airlifter that we have in the air force inventory.
This aircraft is approximately 247 feet long.
It has a wingspan of 222 feet.
And to the top of the tail is 65 feet.
When aircraft are consigned to the boneyard, they're flown into the adjacent Davis-monthan air force base.
The ones that will be rehabbed and fly again stay on the West Side near the airstrip.
The craft that are probably grounded for good are brought across a highway overpass to amarg east, and that's where this big bird is headed.
Can I get inside there before you go? - Sure.
- All right.
Wow! It's a giant plane.
I mean, it looks big from the outside, but it really feels big inside.
It's like a flying warehouse.
Yeah, exactly.
We can fit up to six helicopters.
A lot of stuff.
Even without fuel or cargo, this plane weighs over 300,000 pounds.
I'm going up to the flight deck to see where the crew of six got this bird in the air.
Big, big cockpit.
So I'm gonna take this thing for a spin.
- Is that okay? - Yeah.
Where do you turn it on? You look outside othis, and you can look back and get a sense of how big this fuselage really is.
Wow.
Damn.
Amazing.
Coming into service in 1970, c-5s have airlifted supplies to Vietnam, iraq, even the antarctic.
But they are now being phased out for smaller, more fuel-efficient models.
Look, all around here you see these signatures of the last pilots who were flying this c-5.
I mean, it's very much like a war hero being taken, you know, out here to the to the final resting place.
On a ship that can fit nine greyhound busses, this is how much room they have to sleep.
You can see where their priorities are.
Emergency exit.
Whoa, there we go.
That is so cool.
Damn.
So, I mean, from up here, you get a total idea of the magnitude of this challenge just to move this thing, let alone operate it.
Moving this behemoth requires just one tug and a big crew prepared for trouble.
A lot of these guys haven't ever pulled a c-5 before.
This is the biggest plane they could ever be dealing with.
Even major Roman hasn't seen this moved before.
One thing they don't have to worry about is keeping the c-5 on the pavement, since all this open ground is basically a parking lot.
One of the main reasons we're here is because this dirt can support I mean, there's no pavement here.
No.
Underneath we have this unique subsoil.
- It's called caliche soil.
- Yeah.
It's almost as hard as concrete.
So we can tow an aircraft that weighs over 300,000 pounds, and it won't sink into the ground.
Uh-huh.
There she goes.
Just pulled it off.
That is amazing.
That's a big plane moving pretty fast across the desert.
What are the big, uh, dangers here? What are they worried about? They don't want the wingtips knocking anything over.
This guy's the wing Walker.
He's making sure that this wing doesn't take anything out.
Now all we have to do is get across this bridge without causing a multicar pileup.
Look, you can see the traffic coming underneath the bridge.
Imagine what those people are seeing right now.
Wow.
That's that's a big plane going overhead.
There she goes.
So after 40 years of loyal service, a last mission out here to the boneyard.
This plane has reached the end of the line.
But for others, time at amarg is just a little r & r.
I'll try not to ruin an expensive piece of military infrastructure.
Your tax dollars at work.
I missed a spot.
I'm just outside Tucson, where the parched climate and hard-packed soil of the Arizona desert are being put to good use as a colossal parking lot for over 4,000 military planes.
It's known as the boneyard, but this isn't just where airplanes go to die.
Much more happens here.
My military escort, major Roman, is taking me to one of the active-duty areas most civilians never get to see.
This is more than just a place to stick planes.
There's a lot going on here, right? Yes.
This is the last place the final resting place for most of the aircraft.
That's one of our missions, but we also have three other missions.
Planes on the east side of this sprawling facility are grounded for good.
They'll be sent to museums or slowly dismantled for parts.
But on the West Side, aircraft are being retrofitted, repaired, and sent back into service, and I'm going to see the heart of that operation, a 160,000-square-foot maintenance shed.
How you doin'? - Nice to meet you.
- It's nice to meet you.
- Welcome to amarg.
- Thank you for being with us.
I'm honored.
The man in charge of this whole operation is commanding officer colonel kumashiro.
It takes us approximately 200 days to do maintenance that's required for these aircraft.
Right now, mechanics are overhauling c-130s and getting old fighter planes ready for action.
We work on a-10s, as well.
Ah, the a-10.
The tank killer.
My favorite plane.
Well, it's it has truly been the workhorse, uh, over the last several years.
Known as the tank killer, the a-10 has seen heavy action in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.
It was designed to fly low, survive heavy fire, and take out ground targets.
Uh, my favorite of the of the warplanes, not because it's pretty.
In fact, it's called "the warthog" basically because of these big, fat engines on the back, and if you look over here, the snub nose.
It's just, you know, not the most elegant-looking thing in the sky.
I came here this morning thinking, oh, this is where, you know these planes sitting out in the middle of the desert when they don't have anywhere else to put them.
It's the total opposite here.
The dry desert air is an ideal preservative, but the blazing Arizona heat is another story.
It's murder on sensitive electronics, and even the ferocious f-16 fighting falcon woutdn't last long without a little help.
Now we're gonna give you an opportunity to actually spraylat one of our f-16 fighters.
Spraylat? Spraylat means spraying a protective coat of latex that can be peeled off when it's time for the plane to go back on duty.
- You doing this with me? Excellent.
- Yep, I am doing it with you.
I got the, um, the small.
Did you? I know, it was so we are spraylatting this thing.
Look at that.
We're gonna work on the nose of this plane here, the f-16.
The reason why we spray the aircraft is to protect the cool components.
The spraylat reduces the the temperature the internal temperature by 10 to 15 degrees.
Okay.
All right.
I'll try not to ruin an expensive piece of military infrastructure.
- Right in here? - Uh-huh.
This black coat is a sealant.
After it dries, a white reflective coat is added that keeps the interior from heating up like your car in a parking lot on a hot summer day.
Why don't we try to get a little bit up here? Okay.
I missed a spot.
How do you know when you're done? Well, we'll take this the wet film gauge, and then we'll measure the thickness we'll measure the thickness of the spraylat.
I think I did I think that's my best work so far.
They are assessing my work and taking some time doing it, I'm noticing uh, the commander of the crew.
I'm a little nervous.
It's not dripping.
- There you go, don.
Well done.
Excellent.
- Thank you very much.
Great job.
Ah, shoot, I missed a spot.
I'm navigating a high-risk utopia.
This is the ultimate jungle gym.
Wow! That's pretty intense.
The harsh beauty of the Arizona desert has inspired genius, madness, and ambition.
In the 1980s, all three came together in the foothills above Tucson.
I'm heading into the forbidding sonoran desert to see a one-of-a-kind experiment called biosphere 2.
Oh, look at it.
There it is.
So this is the whole compound.
This is the biosphere here.
Man! This is amazing.
It's like this alien outpost, right? In the middle of the desert.
You just come upon it.
They call it a "planet in a bottle.
" I mean, this is this wacky experiment that was created decades ago to try to figure out how to colonize Mars.
Now it's a state-of-the-art lab to figure out how to save planet earth.
And I'm getting inside here where the scientists go.
Biosphere started out as the wild vision of John p.
Allen.
He rounded up over $150 million to build a prototype for a completely contained, self-sufficient martian space colony.
In 1991, eight eager volunteers, the biospherians, entered the dome and were sealed in for two years.
They encountered pest infestations, infighting, and dangerously high levels of co2.
Biosphere seemed like a failure, but it's gotten a new lease on life, and assistant director John Adams is taking me behind the scenes of this cutting-edge and colossal terrarium.
Goodness, it's so amazing.
It's like a submarine airlock here, almost.
Look at that.
Man.
This this is the basement we're in, yeah? This is the basement.
So we call this area "the technosphere.
" So this is where all the technology resides.
It makes it possible to have these environments up above us.
There are five different environments over my head right now, each with a carefully controlled climate.
So essentially, this is a we're mocking planet earth in here, right? We are.
You know, some of these areas were put look at that.
Yeah, you've got we've got our own ocean right here.
So this is the ocean one, and then we're heading towards the rain forest airlock.
Yeah.
So this is our Equatorial rain forest.
Okay.
Oh, man, look at this.
I mean, you immediately walk into it looks like an ancient rain forest here, all thick thick foliage and banana trees.
This is essentially two decades' worth of growth.
Amazing.
There are over 90 species of plants in here, a Noah's ark sampler of rain forest diversity.
How does a system like this behave when you subject it to a drought Okay.
For an extended period of time? How does the system behave as the co2 in the atmosphere goes up? The evolution of this laboratory mm-hmm.
Essentially went from studying how people survive in a foreign environment to really studying how we survive this is ecology's version of the hubble telescope, and like all precision instruments, it needs constant attention.
Scientists go to the top of the dome weekly to trim trees and take air chemistry readings.
So this is a chance to get up on top of the biosphere and look down on the whole place and get a perspective you can't get otherwise.
It was a cool night outside, warm, moist environment inside.
That means we get lots of condensation on the structure that we're gonna climb through.
Yeah.
So it's gonna be slippery.
This is the ultimate jungle gym.
Okay.
Yeah, it's slippery.
Whew, that was, like, 6 feet.
Okay.
It was.
Whew.
Very interesting.
So everywhere I step is covered in condensation up here and very slippery.
Wow.
That's pretty intense.
Even though I'm on belay here, this is not gonna be pretty if one of us falls.
Okay, so this is the top.
I'm at what height here, 90 A little over 90 feet.
I can't get over the fact that you can quantify, essentially, what is happening on earth inside this capsule.
That's correct.
The biosphere is a vivid illustration of the old saying, "adapt or die.
" As a space colony, it was a failure.
But as a lab, it's a powerful tool for protecting our planet.
Survival is the name of the game in the rugged Arizona wilderness from masterpieces of engineering to military strongholds.
But life out here can still be as unpredictable as a lucky strike.
And this wildwest will never be complete tamed.
Where do you turn it on? Wheels up, we're going to Arizona.
It's a place where you can drown in the middle of the desert Wow! Look at that.
Space colonies are a reality Look at this.
This is not gonna be pretty if one of us falls.
And the wide-open landscape is hiding giant secrets.
It is so intense to imagine waiting for the end of the world.
This is Arizona There's been a lot of death around this.
"Off limits.
" In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world, hiding their amazing stories behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm Don Wildman.
And these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
Off Limits S01E04 Arizona You don't have to, uh, drive very far outside of Tucson to feel like you're in the middle of nowhere.
So this guy named drew sends me an e-mail last night with instructions, uh, to find his place at a certain distance from the road.
I will look up and find a little white chair.
I was told to park the car, march up to this place where I'd find a concrete slab with a white plastic chair.
And so here I am.
As it turns out, this is standard security protocol for accessing an abandoned nuclear missile site.
I'm on the outskirts of Tucson, waiting to see an underground silo that could have triggered world war III.
It's just another chapter in the long history of Arizona's beautiful but deadly countryside.
When you think of the wild west, you imagine the parched deserts and rugged mountains of Arizona.
Today, the bustling cities and breathtaking scenery lure millions of nature-loving tourists here.
But 150 years ago, this was a fierce battleground of apaches, soldiers, prospectors, and bandits.
But none of those dangers could compete with the death and destruction lurking beneath the ground in the 1960s, when 18 massive nuclear weapons were buried in the desert.
They were called the titan ii's, and they could destroy a city halfway around the world in the blink of an eye.
If you want to see what's left, you have to play by some pretty strange rules.
- Hello? Drew.
- Yeah? - Hello, don.
- How you doin'? Pretty good.
Keep the cameras facing down, please.
Oh, I'm sorry.
The military sold the silo to a salvage company in the '80s.
It changed hands again before drew bought it in 2008.
He plans to build a home on top of this ultimate basement shelter and wants to keep his name and the location hidden from would-be vandals.
So we're going in here? That's right.
And I'm gonna shut the doors behind us.
Okay.
You want to cut the cameras.
Cuthe cameras, okay.
All right, hello.
Hey, don.
All right, so we're inside, because this is the entrance.
This is the old entrance, the old elevator shaft that goes down 32 feet.
32 feet down is the cold war.
Yeah.
Oh, my goodness, right away, it all opens up.
After the site was decommissioned by the air force, it was filled in with dirt and concrete until drew came along.
So you dug this out yourself.
With my backhoe, I dug about 15 feet.
Then I had to get an excavator.
Once one of the most restricted spots on earth, it's now drew's property, and we can explore at will.
So that's the blast door there.
Yep.
6,000 pounds right there.
I mean, you can go ahead and push it.
Wow, that is heavy.
Beyond this door, the facility is considered hardened, meaning it's protected from all but a direct nuclear strike.
We've come 32 feet below the desert floor into a sprawling complex.
To one side is a tunnel that connects to the silo, where a giant, 103-foot titan ii was once fueled and ready to go.
In the other direction is the domed control center, a 3-story structure where a crew of 4 had their quarters.
Up to the living quarters? Crew's living quarters.
"Living" I don't know if that's the right word for this.
Yeah.
You know? They were Existing in a terrifying state.
Existing.
And this was the bedroom.
Okay.
There were two bunks in here.
Oh, man.
So there were four crew members that were living in here on 24-hour shifts.
That's right.
The first crew reported for duty soon after the Cuban missile crisis.
A few months later, j.
F.
K.
Was shot.
Many suspected his assassination was a Soviet plot, and a nuclear strike could be next.
With paranoia and fear running high, crews were given regular psychological testing to make sure they could handle the stress of a front-row seat at the end of the world.
Look at this the loudspeakers.
Uh, speakers.
It's happening.
Armageddon has occurred.
Yep.
They would be hearing their orders over this, right? Yeah.
Get downstairs quick.
One level below the crew quarters is the terrifying heart of the operation launch control.
This is where they launched.
Whew.
This is where one desk was with a launch control panel with a key that launched the missile.
Okay, so there's a whole console here right.
That two people are sitting at.
One person there, - one person here.
- One person over here, and this is where the key is turned Turned to launch.
And the buttons are pushed.
Launching required two men, and it would take less than five minutes to enter the codes and turn the keys to unleash a 9-megaton warhead.
The titan ii had a maximum range of 10,000 Miles, could reach moscow in 35 minutes, and was 600 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
I'm noticing that there are, all the way around the perimeter of this room, these huge Springs.
Eight of 'em.
Eight Springs.
Right.
And that's literally keeping this floor on a suspension.
Yeah, this takes the shock wave of a nuclear bomb blast.
Really? Okay.
The silos were a prime target for a Soviet counterstrike and could handle a 1-megaton blast within 2,200 feet.
I'm basically standing on a platform that's attached to the other two levels as a shock-absorption system.
And the whole purpose of that is to protect this this control center from the percussive effect of a nuclear bomb, either one they're firing off, or one that's actually struck outside.
It is so intense to imagine what these guys must have been thinking while they're sitting there, or not thinking, following orders, waiting for the moment when they turn the keys and fire off what is essentially, quite possibly the end of the world.
If the U.
S.
and Soviets had launched all their weapons, world war III would have taken about 45 minutes, killing hundreds of millions of people and blanketing the entire planet in nuclear fallout.
The titans were decommissioned in the 1980s, but today, there are over 500 even more powerful minuteman III missiles in their place.
So this is the tunnel that leads to the silo that holds the missile.
Exactly.
Drew tells me when this facility was shut down in 1984, the missile was removed, the silo was imploded, and the connecting tunnel filled with concrete.
I mean, they have sealed this one completely off with a concrete barrier.
Beyond this is a lot of dirt.
Just a few Miles from drew's place is the only titan silo left intact with a disarmed missile in place.
The military preserved it as a vital piece of history, and it's called "site 17.
" I'm meeting with Chuck penson, who literally wrote the book on these weapons of mass destruction.
How you doing, sir? Welcome to 1-7.
Thank you very much.
You're gonna hear a bell start to ring, and that's just a warning that the hatches are gonna close.
Okay.
- So this is all original? - Oh, yeah.
Nice.
Oh, man, look at that.
It just keeps getting scarier.
So this is what, in drew's silo, is all filled in.
You couldn't go past that wall.
This is the tunnel that was beyond that, leading to the silo that still exists.
Everything's intact in this facility.
Whoa.
And this is it.
This is the man, that is the missile.
That is the missile.
This is a pretty incredible, uh, moment.
I mean, this is what we this is what we're all so scared of, wasn't it? This is titan ii.
It's 103 feet tall.
- You can launch this in one minute.
- No kidding? Yeah.
Oh, my God, I I didn't even look down here.
Wow, look look at this.
All the way down how deep is this, chuck? It goes down to 150 feet.
I don't even know where to begin talking about this.
It's overwhelming that it it even exists, let alone, I mean, that we're able to see it.
And we had 54 of these at 1 time.
Each base cost, in today's, money about $95 million to build, and the 18 here in Arizona were a huge boon the local economy.
Oh, wow.
Isn't that a sight? That is insane.
That was the upside to having a weapon of mass destruction in your backyard.
The downside is obvious.
Look at that thing.
We are basically standing at the bottom of the military-industrial complex.
For 20 years, the titan ii silos were buried and forgotten in the desert sands, like ancient Egyptian tombs.
Some have been unearthed beneath churches and backyards, their secrets exposed.
But others remain hidden, maybe forever, somewhere in the Arizona wilderness.
I'm taking a very wary step back in time There's about a foot of bat crap.
Ugh.
To the birth of a hydroelectric revolution.
Oh, I have vertigo.
And I meet Arizona's baddest retirees.
That is a major, major plane, major.
Arizona isn't all beautiful desolation.
It's teeming with life.
Phoenix alone is home to over 1.
5 million residents, and that couldn't happen without the state's greatest hidden treasure water.
In the early 1900s, the idea of building a city even half the size of modern-day Phoenix smack in the middle of the desert would be unthinkable.
But there was one man with an incredible vision of what the west could be.
And fortunately for Phoenix, he had the political power to turn his vision into reality, because that man was the President of the United States.
Before Theodore Roosevelt was president, he was an adventurer, a hunter, and a rancher.
But in 1900,he knew the west couldn't stay wild for much longer.
He promoted bold land-management programs that would turn deserts into family farms.
Decades before the hoover dam was built on the state's border, Arizona was breaking ground in the salt river canyon on the most ambitious hydro project ever attempted in the U.
S.
Today, I'm heading 80 Miles northeast of Phoenix, following the salt river to a president's vision made concrete Theodore Roosevelt dam.
For security reasons, I can't show how I got up here.
Entry to the dam site is extremely restricted.
But I got an all-access pass from company spokesman James labar.
When was this dam built originally? This dam was originally built from 1903 to 1911.
It's over 100 years old.
I have been to the top of hoover dam, but that is no more inspiring than this.
I mean, this is where it really began, right? Yeah.
All the ideas that are encapsulated within hoover all started here.
Today, the dam helps power almost a million homes in Phoenix, but it was originally built to turn the desert into farmland.
In 1902,roosevelt signed the reclamation act into law, opening the floodgates on millions of dollars in loans to help reclaim arid land in the west.
The farmers down in the valley put their lands up for collateral to stabilize that loan to build this dam.
The land was ready.
It was fertile.
All it needed was a steady water supply.
Totally flies in the face that of Arizona being a dry state.
There's a lot of water here.
Yeah, there's a lot of water, 'cause there's been a lot of planning.
And that was the local farmers who made that happen.
They risked everything.
The farmers' gamble paid off, with the largest masonry dam to date in America.
It was 280 feet high and almost 200 feet thick at the base.
Oh, man, that is awesome.
Jeez! I have vertigo.
Back in 1911,the dam looked much different, with rows and rows of giant stone blocks slightly stepped back, almost like the walls of the great pyramid.
In the 1990s, it was sheathed in concrete and enlarged.
But the foundation is the same, and there's only one place to see it.
So we're going inside the dam here? Yeah, we're going right inside the dam.
And what we're gonna see here is just an amazing connection between the past and the present.
All right.
Here's the stone.
So this is a tunnel that was dug out of the Mountain here.
It runs right along the curvature of the dam.
This tunnel was part of the original structure and was engineered to combat a potentially catastrophic problem.
As water from the vast reservoir seeps into the bedrock, pressure builds up beneath the dam.
To release the pressure, hundreds of holes were drilled into the stone.
So are these these tubes that are coming out of the yeah, these are the tubes that are relieving the pressure.
How many of these tubes are there? Approximately 300.
300? Okay.
Oh, wow, this is really amazing.
That one's cold.
Look at that the minerals coming out of there have just built up.
So right here, we get the transition where we're going from the canyon wall to the dam.
Okay.
So this is the beginning of the dam right here.
Yeah.
You're no longer walking through a natural environment.
This is a man-made structure here.
This is all the masonry wall built of the stone that was quarried from the canyon around.
It was a massive building project in the middle of nowhere.
Crew members ranging from apache laborers to Italian marble workers had to build their own road to get here.
And to power heavy machinery out in the wilderness, they started generating their own electricity in 1909.
They sold the extra juice to neighboring towns like Phoenix.
And soon, the demand was so high, the generators were running around the clock.
Today, the dam built for farmers is part of the salt river project, the third largest power provider in the nation, and it all started in this transformer station.
Let's take a look in this building.
You've got to be careful of the bats.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay, so this is just an old office building now.
They redid it.
Yeah, and it's been abandoned for quite a number of years.
Can I get up here? Yeah, go for it.
All right.
Let's just take a look.
Okay, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of materials.
This is a really, uh, smelly and gross environment.
Look, so this is old Theodore Roosevelt dam, right, original transformer house.
Whoo.
First of all, beneath my feet there's about a foot of bat crap, just guano, and I don't want to breathe it in too much.
Look at this.
You can see all the old equipment, the old transformer equipment.
This is where power generated by the dam was boosted to higher wattage so it could make the 80-mile journey to Phoenix.
So this is not a very healthy environment, but it's a pretty cool way to see, you know, how things got started here.
Producing and selling electricity was the unforeseen and lucrative twist to Roosevelt's vision, and hydro power plants quickly spread throughout the west.
When Roosevelt dedicated this dam in 1911, he thought it would someday provide water for 100,000 people.
Today, it's serving up power, as well, to almost a million with water to spare.
So this is not a frequently accessed space, I assume.
No, not many people get to go down here.
Whenever we have to move water around the dam without going through the generator, we've got to move it through these big pipes.
Okay.
Man, that is a serious, serious outlet.
If this was open, what would be happening to us right now? We would be in the riverbed.
Okay, dead.
Dead.
Is there any way that we can see what happens? Can you lift these gates up? I think we can work that out for you.
No way.
Really? Yeah.
But we're not gonna be standing here while we do it.
You stand here.
I'll go open it up.
Each one of these pipes can move nearly 7500 gallons of water per second.
Today, we're just doing 40% of that.
Okay, just push it right now? That's good.
That's it? Okay.
Now I go over there? Whoa, there it goes.
Wow, listen to that! And look at this.
This is already vibrating.
That is how much water is coming through that pipe right underneath my feet.
Awesome! Man, you can just feel the power of the water.
All right, 40%! Cut it! Oh, I gotta see this water.
Oh, my lord, unbelievable! Wow! Look at that geyser of water.
Unbelievable! Now talk about an exhilarating, powerful sensation.
Here it comes.
Watch.
Go, baby, go! Yeah! That is amazing.
Hydroelectric power that's it.
I had no idea, until I saw it coming out of that pipe, how powerful sheer water can be.
You can feel the power here, literally.
Roosevelt understood that water was a mighty force for change, but even he had no idea it was powerful enough to change the face of a continent.
I did that.
Striking gold is tough It's like I'm panning for gold right here.
But hitting the mother lode is to die for.
70-some people have died.
What? In the old days, prospectors in Arizona's back country braved intense heat and cold-blooded killers, hoping to strike it rich.
Gold fever has a huge body count, and it's still claiming victims in the 21st century.
Most of us have a kind of romantic view of the gold rush.
A lone prospector stumbles on a big nugget of gold and becomes wildly rich overnight.
But the reality of gold mining was much darker.
Countless people died in a harsh wilderness.
Others were murdered over their claims.
Still others just went crazy in pursuit of this elusive yellow metal.
I'm at the base of the superstition mountains near the remains of a former boomtown, Goldfield.
In the 1890s, thousands of treasure hunters swarmed here, lured by several rich strikes and the legend of the lost dutchman mine.
If the stories are true, the ore from the dutchman is the richest in the world.
Hundreds have hunted for it, and dozens have died.
I'm meeting one of the last eyewitnesses to the madness.
Hello.
- Good morning.
- Good morning.
81-year-old Clay worst lives and works on the old wasp mine, a claim he believes is worth millions.
This was an open-pit mine that is at the end of its economic life.
Okay.
Clay's father was an Alaskan prospector, and he's carried on the family business here in Arizona.
So this is the pit here, huh? This is the pit.
There's big-time gold right in the bottom of that pit.
It gives me that little feeling of It's probably greed yep.
But it's exciting.
It looks like a desolate gully, but this trench has yielded almost a half a million dollars in gold.
I mean, as opposed to underground mining, where it's, like, the tunnel and the whole thing, this is open-pit mining.
That's what Clay's been doing here for 20,30 years.
Clay is still making a living by processing up to 6 tons of dirt per day a huge effort to produce 1/2 ounce of gold.
You're basically seeing prospecting gold prospecting as it was done way back when.
It's just a little more mechanized.
What's happening here, clay? There are riffles on the table Yeah? And a sheet of water.
That washes the lighter material off into the tailing side.
This is all about gravity.
The heavy element gold is gonna come out on the end.
I mean, we're basically looking at pieces of gold coming down here very small ones, but some more significant than others all floating down, getting shaken down into this, the fine cut right here.
There are several nice particles in here.
It's like I'm panning for gold right here.
Yep.
Man, I am hooked.
This is great.
Once he's collected enough gold dust, about two months' worth, Clay melts it down into a single bar of gold.
This is a small refinery and a met lab.
You gotta be careful how you pronounce that.
It is not a meth lab, it's a met lab I was gonna say Metallurgical laboratory.
This is amazing.
Well, it's kind of a nice little mad scientist laboratory.
Yeah.
It's like you're an alchemist back here.
Clay melts his gold dust in this tiny, but powerful furnace.
We've gotta go to 2,100, and we're only up to 1,982 now.
Okay.
So it's gonna be another 20 minutes well, in the meantime, take me through this legend of the lost dutchman mine.
What's the speculation on this legend? Oh, that thing is back there.
The lost dutchman there's absolutely no doubt about it.
The legend began in 1891 in Phoenix, when prospector Jacob waltz made a deathbed confession.
He had stumbled upon three Mexicans working, and he admitted that he killed them and took possession of the mine.
Waltz said that the mine, filled with rich gold ore worth millions, was hidden in the superstition mountains.
A deadly treasure hunt began that is still going on to this day.
There have been so many fatalities that many believe the mine is cursed.
So there's been a lot of death around this.
We think 70-some people have died.
What? In fact, three of 'em here in just the last year they just picked up three skeletons back there in the last month.
Back in the 1960s, we were averaging a homicide every 90 days for a while.
So these are serious, brutal murders.
One was Jim cravey, and this was in in 1947, and he had been beheaded.
To this day, no one has found the dutchman, but at least I get to see what inspired all the madness.
So we're gonna pour the gold bar right now.
Yep.
Here it comes.
Okay, here's your molten gold.
Wow, that is really neat.
Yep.
So you're looking at $20,000.
Get every last drop.
There it goes.
There it is.
And to think that we started with a pile of dirt yep.
And end up with pure gold.
Yep.
A lot of people, you you hand them the bar, and they know it's yours.
Almost got it.
Give me that.
Give me that.
Get it back from 'em.
Yeah.
She's beautiful.
Yeah.
Clay has to scratch for every ounce of this precious metal, but it puts food on the table and allows him to stay here near the elusive mine.
He hasn't been up in the mountains for years, but his mule is ready, just in case he finds a clue that finally solves the mystery of the dutchman.
You might think that the hard, sun-baked ground of Southern Arizona is only good for growing cactus.
But this killer dessert is also a surprising sanctuary, the final stop for war planes in the U.
S.
Arizona has about 350 days a year of brilliant sunshine, which makes it ideal for retirement after a long, hard career.
But that doesn't just apply to people.
Look.
Look at this.
On the other side of this fence, there are more than 4,000 military aircraft that have flown missions from Vietnam to Antarctica that are waiting to either be called back into service or to be scrapped for parts.
It's an amazing collection of multimillion-dollar machines that have served our country well for decades.
And you know what's really great? I get to go inside.
Just South of downtown Tucson, stretching over 2,600 acres, is amarg, the aerospace maintenance and regeneration group, nicknamed "the boneyard.
" Arizona's dry weather makes this the perfect place to preserve and repair a fleet too big to fit in hangars.
People come from all over the world to peek through the fence, but major Kathryn Roman is meeting me at the perimeter to escort me through the tight air force security, as long as we don't point our cameras at the checkpoint guard station.
It's kinda hard to wrap yourself around how big this place is.
I mean, pretty much to where we're almost to those mountains, right? - We're looking at airplanes.
- Yes.
The inventory out here is worth $27 billion, making the Smithsonian air and space museum look like a model shop.
You can find everything from Vietnam-era choppers to b-52 bombers and enough cargo planes to move a small city.
These aircraft, they're like giant warehouses - Okay.
- For parts.
They're not gonna fly anymore, but what we'll use them for is parts harvesting.
The newest addition is the largest aircraft in the U.
S.
fleet, the c-5a.
Ma that's a big plane.
That is a major, major plane, major.
It is.
It's our largest airlifter that we have in the air force inventory.
This aircraft is approximately 247 feet long.
It has a wingspan of 222 feet.
And to the top of the tail is 65 feet.
When aircraft are consigned to the boneyard, they're flown into the adjacent Davis-monthan air force base.
The ones that will be rehabbed and fly again stay on the West Side near the airstrip.
The craft that are probably grounded for good are brought across a highway overpass to amarg east, and that's where this big bird is headed.
Can I get inside there before you go? - Sure.
- All right.
Wow! It's a giant plane.
I mean, it looks big from the outside, but it really feels big inside.
It's like a flying warehouse.
Yeah, exactly.
We can fit up to six helicopters.
A lot of stuff.
Even without fuel or cargo, this plane weighs over 300,000 pounds.
I'm going up to the flight deck to see where the crew of six got this bird in the air.
Big, big cockpit.
So I'm gonna take this thing for a spin.
- Is that okay? - Yeah.
Where do you turn it on? You look outside othis, and you can look back and get a sense of how big this fuselage really is.
Wow.
Damn.
Amazing.
Coming into service in 1970, c-5s have airlifted supplies to Vietnam, iraq, even the antarctic.
But they are now being phased out for smaller, more fuel-efficient models.
Look, all around here you see these signatures of the last pilots who were flying this c-5.
I mean, it's very much like a war hero being taken, you know, out here to the to the final resting place.
On a ship that can fit nine greyhound busses, this is how much room they have to sleep.
You can see where their priorities are.
Emergency exit.
Whoa, there we go.
That is so cool.
Damn.
So, I mean, from up here, you get a total idea of the magnitude of this challenge just to move this thing, let alone operate it.
Moving this behemoth requires just one tug and a big crew prepared for trouble.
A lot of these guys haven't ever pulled a c-5 before.
This is the biggest plane they could ever be dealing with.
Even major Roman hasn't seen this moved before.
One thing they don't have to worry about is keeping the c-5 on the pavement, since all this open ground is basically a parking lot.
One of the main reasons we're here is because this dirt can support I mean, there's no pavement here.
No.
Underneath we have this unique subsoil.
- It's called caliche soil.
- Yeah.
It's almost as hard as concrete.
So we can tow an aircraft that weighs over 300,000 pounds, and it won't sink into the ground.
Uh-huh.
There she goes.
Just pulled it off.
That is amazing.
That's a big plane moving pretty fast across the desert.
What are the big, uh, dangers here? What are they worried about? They don't want the wingtips knocking anything over.
This guy's the wing Walker.
He's making sure that this wing doesn't take anything out.
Now all we have to do is get across this bridge without causing a multicar pileup.
Look, you can see the traffic coming underneath the bridge.
Imagine what those people are seeing right now.
Wow.
That's that's a big plane going overhead.
There she goes.
So after 40 years of loyal service, a last mission out here to the boneyard.
This plane has reached the end of the line.
But for others, time at amarg is just a little r & r.
I'll try not to ruin an expensive piece of military infrastructure.
Your tax dollars at work.
I missed a spot.
I'm just outside Tucson, where the parched climate and hard-packed soil of the Arizona desert are being put to good use as a colossal parking lot for over 4,000 military planes.
It's known as the boneyard, but this isn't just where airplanes go to die.
Much more happens here.
My military escort, major Roman, is taking me to one of the active-duty areas most civilians never get to see.
This is more than just a place to stick planes.
There's a lot going on here, right? Yes.
This is the last place the final resting place for most of the aircraft.
That's one of our missions, but we also have three other missions.
Planes on the east side of this sprawling facility are grounded for good.
They'll be sent to museums or slowly dismantled for parts.
But on the West Side, aircraft are being retrofitted, repaired, and sent back into service, and I'm going to see the heart of that operation, a 160,000-square-foot maintenance shed.
How you doin'? - Nice to meet you.
- It's nice to meet you.
- Welcome to amarg.
- Thank you for being with us.
I'm honored.
The man in charge of this whole operation is commanding officer colonel kumashiro.
It takes us approximately 200 days to do maintenance that's required for these aircraft.
Right now, mechanics are overhauling c-130s and getting old fighter planes ready for action.
We work on a-10s, as well.
Ah, the a-10.
The tank killer.
My favorite plane.
Well, it's it has truly been the workhorse, uh, over the last several years.
Known as the tank killer, the a-10 has seen heavy action in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.
It was designed to fly low, survive heavy fire, and take out ground targets.
Uh, my favorite of the of the warplanes, not because it's pretty.
In fact, it's called "the warthog" basically because of these big, fat engines on the back, and if you look over here, the snub nose.
It's just, you know, not the most elegant-looking thing in the sky.
I came here this morning thinking, oh, this is where, you know these planes sitting out in the middle of the desert when they don't have anywhere else to put them.
It's the total opposite here.
The dry desert air is an ideal preservative, but the blazing Arizona heat is another story.
It's murder on sensitive electronics, and even the ferocious f-16 fighting falcon woutdn't last long without a little help.
Now we're gonna give you an opportunity to actually spraylat one of our f-16 fighters.
Spraylat? Spraylat means spraying a protective coat of latex that can be peeled off when it's time for the plane to go back on duty.
- You doing this with me? Excellent.
- Yep, I am doing it with you.
I got the, um, the small.
Did you? I know, it was so we are spraylatting this thing.
Look at that.
We're gonna work on the nose of this plane here, the f-16.
The reason why we spray the aircraft is to protect the cool components.
The spraylat reduces the the temperature the internal temperature by 10 to 15 degrees.
Okay.
All right.
I'll try not to ruin an expensive piece of military infrastructure.
- Right in here? - Uh-huh.
This black coat is a sealant.
After it dries, a white reflective coat is added that keeps the interior from heating up like your car in a parking lot on a hot summer day.
Why don't we try to get a little bit up here? Okay.
I missed a spot.
How do you know when you're done? Well, we'll take this the wet film gauge, and then we'll measure the thickness we'll measure the thickness of the spraylat.
I think I did I think that's my best work so far.
They are assessing my work and taking some time doing it, I'm noticing uh, the commander of the crew.
I'm a little nervous.
It's not dripping.
- There you go, don.
Well done.
Excellent.
- Thank you very much.
Great job.
Ah, shoot, I missed a spot.
I'm navigating a high-risk utopia.
This is the ultimate jungle gym.
Wow! That's pretty intense.
The harsh beauty of the Arizona desert has inspired genius, madness, and ambition.
In the 1980s, all three came together in the foothills above Tucson.
I'm heading into the forbidding sonoran desert to see a one-of-a-kind experiment called biosphere 2.
Oh, look at it.
There it is.
So this is the whole compound.
This is the biosphere here.
Man! This is amazing.
It's like this alien outpost, right? In the middle of the desert.
You just come upon it.
They call it a "planet in a bottle.
" I mean, this is this wacky experiment that was created decades ago to try to figure out how to colonize Mars.
Now it's a state-of-the-art lab to figure out how to save planet earth.
And I'm getting inside here where the scientists go.
Biosphere started out as the wild vision of John p.
Allen.
He rounded up over $150 million to build a prototype for a completely contained, self-sufficient martian space colony.
In 1991, eight eager volunteers, the biospherians, entered the dome and were sealed in for two years.
They encountered pest infestations, infighting, and dangerously high levels of co2.
Biosphere seemed like a failure, but it's gotten a new lease on life, and assistant director John Adams is taking me behind the scenes of this cutting-edge and colossal terrarium.
Goodness, it's so amazing.
It's like a submarine airlock here, almost.
Look at that.
Man.
This this is the basement we're in, yeah? This is the basement.
So we call this area "the technosphere.
" So this is where all the technology resides.
It makes it possible to have these environments up above us.
There are five different environments over my head right now, each with a carefully controlled climate.
So essentially, this is a we're mocking planet earth in here, right? We are.
You know, some of these areas were put look at that.
Yeah, you've got we've got our own ocean right here.
So this is the ocean one, and then we're heading towards the rain forest airlock.
Yeah.
So this is our Equatorial rain forest.
Okay.
Oh, man, look at this.
I mean, you immediately walk into it looks like an ancient rain forest here, all thick thick foliage and banana trees.
This is essentially two decades' worth of growth.
Amazing.
There are over 90 species of plants in here, a Noah's ark sampler of rain forest diversity.
How does a system like this behave when you subject it to a drought Okay.
For an extended period of time? How does the system behave as the co2 in the atmosphere goes up? The evolution of this laboratory mm-hmm.
Essentially went from studying how people survive in a foreign environment to really studying how we survive this is ecology's version of the hubble telescope, and like all precision instruments, it needs constant attention.
Scientists go to the top of the dome weekly to trim trees and take air chemistry readings.
So this is a chance to get up on top of the biosphere and look down on the whole place and get a perspective you can't get otherwise.
It was a cool night outside, warm, moist environment inside.
That means we get lots of condensation on the structure that we're gonna climb through.
Yeah.
So it's gonna be slippery.
This is the ultimate jungle gym.
Okay.
Yeah, it's slippery.
Whew, that was, like, 6 feet.
Okay.
It was.
Whew.
Very interesting.
So everywhere I step is covered in condensation up here and very slippery.
Wow.
That's pretty intense.
Even though I'm on belay here, this is not gonna be pretty if one of us falls.
Okay, so this is the top.
I'm at what height here, 90 A little over 90 feet.
I can't get over the fact that you can quantify, essentially, what is happening on earth inside this capsule.
That's correct.
The biosphere is a vivid illustration of the old saying, "adapt or die.
" As a space colony, it was a failure.
But as a lab, it's a powerful tool for protecting our planet.
Survival is the name of the game in the rugged Arizona wilderness from masterpieces of engineering to military strongholds.
But life out here can still be as unpredictable as a lucky strike.
And this wildwest will never be complete tamed.