What is a Tower Climber?

There are really only two types of men who survive the tower climber life for long- those who love it and those who need it.

Imagine your alarm clock shattering your dreams at 5:45am, when the entire world is frozen in an endless northern cold front. It's January in Minnesota or Maine or Michigan, and there's work to do: tower sites to build, upgrades to make, problems to fix.

You stumble out of bed, confused for a moment on which direction the bathroom is in some strange hotel room.

An hour later, the sky still dark, you step outside of the warm truck and unlock the gate to the tower compound. You put on the rest of your gear: clothing that a mountaineer in the Himalayas or the Alaska range might recognize plus 40 pounds of harness, rigging, and tools. Then you grab a half inch diameter load rope from a plastic bucket and attach it to a heavy steel carabiner, which you attach with a crisp "click" to the hip of your harness.

Your body hurts as you step on the first peg of the tower. You stretch your arms and feel your spine crack a dozen times instantly. You begin to climb- slowly, smoothly, and confidently in the still-dark morning.

It becomes obvious the moment you climb above the trees. The winter wind rips at your face and the water around your eyes begins to freeze, making it difficult to open them. You curse the cold and huddle with your back against the wind trying to regroup. Everything feels like chaos in the ripping wind, and a heavy snow blows through the trees below you. You can't even see the ground.

Your friend climbs up below you, commenting in barely audible shouts about the beautiful weather, and how much he loves Minnesota or Maine or Michigan and you feel recharged. It takes a different kind of courage to face a monster alone, and having someone beside you makes you stronger, braver, and more willing to take chances. You climb on. You pass the blinking midway light at 150 feet. A few minutes later, you reach the top at three hundred feet, the ground and trees invisible, the wind battering and freezing you, the rope weighing you down with what feels like another hundred pounds of force.

You rig the rope with a pulley to the tower leg and run the rope down the tower. You don't know when the rope has reached the ground so you keep pulling it until it stops on the other end. You dig in the inner pockets of your coat to get your phone. Batteries don't last long in the cold and the company you work for is too cheap to provide functioning walkie-talkies. You call the guys on the ground:

"You got the rope?!" You yell into your phone.

"No dude!"

"Fuck!" You yell, instinctively.

You pull the rope back up and it comes free and you manage to feed it to the ground.

This begins your work day, and for the next 10-16 hours you live on the steel, surviving on whatever snacks and drinks you collected at the gas station that morning, urinating into the frozen air when the need arises and working feverishly against what feels like wave after wave of troubles, problems and tedious rules created by people in offices who you will never meet and have no idea what you do for a living.

Once you're done for the day, if you're lucky, you'll eat a large meal, drink a tall beer, go to your room, take a hot shower, and go to sleep.

At 5:45 the alarm will ring and you'll do it all over again.

This is what is takes to be a tower climber.