What It's Like At (Nearly) The Top Of North Carolina's Tallest Structure
What It's Like At (Nearly) The Top Of North Carolina's Tallest Structure
Years ago, I met a man who took me up more than 1,800 feet above the ground in Gaston County. Here's how I got up there, what I saw, and what it's like to climb towers for a living.
The first thing David Haas asked me when I got out of my car was whether I remembered to bring a hoodie. It was 83 degrees and sunny.
I had. Then David started to hand me equipment. A harness with two large carabiners attached to straps. A brand new hardhat. A pouch for my audio recorder. More carabiners. And, finally, gloves. “In case we have to climb down,” he said.
I started to sweat a little as we walked toward the elevator that would take us up toward the top of a 2,000 foot television tower. It wasn’t just the heat, and David sensed this. A moment before we started our ascent, he pulled me aside. “I don’t want to scare you, but I want to make you aware of what you might feel,” he said. “This can be scary if you’re not used to it. Don’t let your heart control your thought process. Logic. Reason. Let you mind rule here, not your heart. Don’t let anything make you so afraid that you lose control.”
And then we went up.
I’d only just met David, but I’d known about him for a long time. For a decade, I worked as a news producer for WCNC-TV in Charlotte. Every so often, I’d walk into the engineering office to get something fixed, and I’d occasionally hear the engineers talking about issues at the tower. All I knew was that it was Gaston County somewhere, and that it was really tall. Once, a piece of ice fell off the top of it and blew out the back window of one of the engineer’s cars.
Whenever something needed to be fixed up there—a light, electronics, anything—they’d call David. His job was a little bit nuts, they’d say. They’d refer to a picture they’d seen once. It showed David, in blue jeans and boots, standing on a small ladder attached to the orange antenna on the tip of the tower. The ground was far, far below.
When I first called David, I asked him if that picture was real. Sure was, he said.
Some of the engineers had gone up in the tower with David to do repair work, but I never had the chance. It wasn’t until 2017, two years after I left local television, that I thought about it again. By then, I was working for Our State magazine and trying to put together the first season of Away Message, a podcast about North Carolina’s remote places. The top of a television tower seemed pretty remote to me.
So I called a few engineers and asked if they would take me up in one of the towers. Absolutely not, they said. But they gave me David’s phone number. I called him, told him who I was, and what I wanted to do. David thought for a moment. Sure, he said. I’ll make you my unpaid assistant for the day, and you can come up with me. (Stating the obvious here: Do not track down David and ask him if you can become his unpaid assistant for a day, and do not otherwise attempt to go up in a television tower yourself.)
Hence, during the spring of 2017, I found myself inside an cage-like elevator that was slowly climbing at 91 feet per minute toward the top of the tallest structure in North Carolina. As we went up past the blinking strobe lights that marked 300, 600, 900, and 1,200 feet, the temperature quickly dropped. It’s usually 10 degrees colder up on the tower than it is on the ground, David said.
Crowders Mountain was easy to see. A few minutes after I spotted it, I looked at it again. It was below us.
At one point the rattling shook the door open slightly, which caused the elevator to stop unexpectedly. David explained that this isn’t unusual, and that a safety switch wouldn’t allow the car to move with the door open. David—who was riding ON TOP OF THE ELEVATOR so his assistant Justin and I could fit inside the car—then tried to calm me down with another piece of information. “Even if both cables were to completely break, this elevator would stay,” he said. “It may fall 20 or 30 feet before the dogs kick in. But this elevator will not freefall down the tower.”
“I should have had you talk to my wife before I came up here,” I said. I chuckled a little to take my mind off of what was happening. Justin closed the door, hit a button, and we kept going up.
Tall buildings get attention in a way that tall towers do not. You’ve heard of the Sears Tower in Chicago, which is now called the Willis Tower. It was the tallest building in the world from 1974 until 1998. Today, it’s the 26th-tallest building, and the third-tallest in the United States behind the Freedom Tower and Central Park Tower in New York. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is, at 2,717 feet, the world’s tallest building, and many of the biggest skyscrapers have been built in Asia and the Middle East over the past two decades. Still, only three skyscrapers worldwide have ever hit or exceeded the 2,000 foot mark.
In the United States alone, at least 19 television broadcast towers are listed to be at 2,000 feet or taller.
Some minutiae here. First, I say “listed” because over time, several television towers have gotten shorter. The reason: The VHF antennas that used to use to broadcast analog signals were removed at some point after the switchover to digital. Hence, towers that replaced the analog antennas at the top with digital ones have shrunk, since digital antennas are shorter. Other stations just removed those analog poles. That affected what had been the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere: The KVLY-TV broadcast tower in Blanchard, North Dakota. In 2019, the station removed the VHF antenna from the top, and the 2,063-foot-tall tower shrunk down to a mere 1,967 feet tall. Also, while there’s no height limit for towers, both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration both require tower builders to make a strong case as to why a tower that’s higher than 2,000 feet serves the public interest. The KVLY and nearby KRDK tower (which is now the tallest at 2,060 feet) were built in the 1960s before those FCC and FAA guidelines went into place. One other tower in California comes in at 2,049 feet.
Hence, there were more than a dozen of towers that came in right at 2,000 feet, including three in North Carolina. One was WECT’s tower outside of Wilmington, which was imploded in 2012 and set the world record for largest structure ever demolished (all it took was 21 pounds of strategically-placed explosives).
WRAL’s current tower south of Raleigh also came in right at 2,000 feet (and swapped out its antennas at the top in 2019, thanks to a helicopter and some tower climbing crews). And then there’s WBTV’s tower in Gaston County, which also hits the same height. That structure was built in 1984 to increase the station’s signal range from 63 miles to 80 miles. Its construction was the source of fascination for the people living nearby. One woman was so enthralled that she regularly went outside with binoculars to watch, and locked herself out of the house at least once. She also didn’t really care that WBTV’s signal was improving. She regularly watched WSOC instead.
The tower became North Carolina’s tallest man-made structure, more than twice as high as the tallest building in North Carolina, the 876-foot-tall Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte. (One last thing: The top of the tower is 2,720 feet above sea level, meaning Mount Mitchell remains North Carolina’s highest point at 6,684 feet in elevation.)
Height matters. “It’s amazing the reach that this television station has,” said John Carter, a WBTV anchor who grew up watching the station as a kid in Shelby. Combine a long history (the station was the first in the Carolinas to come on the air in 1949) with a tall tower that blasts out a high-powered signal that can penetrate into some of the most rugged nooks and crannies in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and you get ratings that have been strong since the beginning. Television viewership has traditionally been built on habit, and it’s hard to build a habit watching a station that doesn’t come in very well. “It is amazing the affinity people have for this TV station in some of the most remote areas of Western North Carolina, down in South Carolina, even to the east of Charlotte. It just amazes me,” Carter told me. “A hundred miles away in mountains, there are people that don’t have cable that still have an emotional bond with WBTV. It’s amazing to me.”
The tower will be 40 years old this year, and despite the upheavals in the ways we get information, the antenna at the top still broadcasts WBTV’s signal 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. “There are a lot of people out there too this day that don’t use cable,” Carter said. “As far as I know this tower will always be there. I don’t know of anything that will supplant it.”
Which means somebody will always have to take care of it.
At 1,500 feet above the ground, the elevator stopped. On purpose this time. David’s assistant Justin opened the door and clipped one of the two carabiners on his harness to a metal pole outside of the elevator. He stepped out, and then helped me to do the same. I had to step over a three foot gap and grab on to the ladder. I took a deep breath. I stepped out.
At that level, there’s a fairly wide wrap-around platform with railings that allows you to step on the outside of the tower. There, David and Justin opened up some large metal cabinets and started working on the electronic components inside. They radioed in to an engineer inside the transmitter building some 1,500 feet below.
David had this job because electronics repair is what he knows. After he graduated from Hunter Huss High School in Gastonia, he went into TV and small appliance repair at his dad’s shop, Haas & Herron Electronics. He took it over when his dad retired, and he also started teaching electronics. “One of my students was managing that tower over there for a company called LodeStar,” David said, pointing at the WCNC tower that’s only a few miles away. “I was scratching for dollars teaching part-time at Gaston College and running the TV business. I was going for months and weeks without even a paycheck from my TV business. So when I got the opportunity to work on those lights and that door was open, I ran with it as hard as I could. I eventually closed the TV repair business because there’s not any money in that. The lights on these towers have to be maintained. My skills are worth more here. It’s a more secure, dependable income.”
After ten minutes, the repair work was finished, and David had a question for me: “Why don’t I take you a little further up, and show you another antenna up there?” So, we got back on the elevator and went up as high as we could go, to 1,860 feet above the ground. As we did, we passed the transmitter for an FM radio station, and while the elevator deflected the powerful RF that can be dangerous at such a closer range, my audio equipment picked up the music from the antenna that’s right outside.
The elevator stopped, and this time we stepped out on to a smaller platform that’s contained completely inside the tower. To go up any further required a climb up the ladder. So, we stopped there.
Looking down the tower, there was no way to see the bottom from 1,500 feet. Instead, it was just a vortex of seemingly infinite white triangles. Looking out, from the platform, it felt like being on an airplane where the scenery doesn’t move. I’ve seen views like this before—there’s something desensitizing from having Google Earth and an endless supply of drone videos to watch on YouTube, but up there, the big difference was that things are in motion. The cars, doing at least 55 miles per hour down on Highway 321, crawled along like ants. At the edge of a brown farm field, buzzards circled something. A gray wisp of smoke rose up from some green woods. There was not a lot of movement, but there is movement, and it’s subtle, and it’s enough to make you realize that what you’re seeing isn’t on a screen. It’s real.
It was only when the elevator stopped that I realized that I was much higher than I thought, higher than I’d ever been off the ground and still tethered to the ground. When I’m inside a plane, I’m mostly surrounded. It’s like being on a bus with tiny windows. On the tower, I was out in the open air. The carabiners and harness are the only things that keep a sudden gust of wind or a stumble over my own feet from carrying me over the side.
It was… not scary. How could I be scared? I was not on the earth anymore. Below, the air was hot. Here, it’s breezy and cool. The people near me are not wearing spacesuits. It’s foreign, but not so foreign as to be frightened.
I was, admittedly, there under the best possible circumstances. I was not being hit directly by RF which, I’m told, makes your body heat up when you’re bombarded with too much of it. I stayed within the confines of some sort of steel. I was not hanging from the side as David sometimes does, changing a light bulb, or climbing to the very top to fix something on the antenna. It wasn’t cold, windy, or cloudy. The tower wasn’t swaying. I was a visitor. I got to contemplate these things because I did not have work to do. I was not afraid of falling. I was secure. I was going to be okay. If anything, I was a little worried that I was not more worried.
I remember going hang gliding one time. My grandmother bought me some tandem time for my 25th birthday when I went to visit her in Florida. We got towed up in an ultralight to, maybe, 3,000 feet or so, and then the ultralight cut the cord and flew away, and it was just me and another guy on my back, whooshing along in the humid tropical air. He pushed forward on the bar and the hang glider climbed until it stalled, and there was the sound of the breeze until the glider lost all lift and stalled, and in that second, thousands of feet above the ground, I was not moving and I could just hear. It was quiet. Then the glider pitched forward, and the whooshing wind returned, and we did some spins and stuff and 20 minutes later we landed in a field on the ground. But the thing that stuck with me was that second of silence. It was fleeting. Hard to get. I didn’t think I’d ever get it again.
And I didn’t, until I was up in the tower.
David doesn’t have time to think about all of this stuff. He just focuses on his work. He’s not merely calm, he’s one of the most chill people I’ve ever met. “This is not a place for a thrill seeker. I don’t go to Carowinds, I don’t go to the amusement parks and things like that. I’m not amused by taking risks,” he said. “The airplane people that fly have a saying that there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots, and that applies to this industry as well. You’ve got people that have been working on towers for a long times. Sometimes you have someone that’s a bit of a renegade, and they run around like a squirrel, but they usually don’t last.”
The job of a tower climber boils down to two things: Trust and fear. David has never fully gotten over his fear of heights. In fact, fear is part of what drives him to be safe. “You manage the fear by pushing the envelope, by pushing the limits, by finding out what you can do and what you can’t do,” he told me. “You learn what the limits are. You learn what’s possible.”
That said, you also have to have trust. I trusted David, because he’s incredibly calm and makes sure I’m always clipped in so I won’t fall. David trusts his assistant. He trusts the tower, and the people who built it 40 years ago. He has to. “When you climb that antenna, there’s nothing around you anymore to hold on to. You’re strapped to this pole. And you really start things like, ‘I hope the welder that welded the flange on the bottom of the antenna had a good day,’” he said. “You hope that it wasn’t a Monday, or a Friday. You start thinking about things like that, and your mind can play tricks on you and if you’re not careful, your mind can get away from you.”
Hence, emotions can do more than get in the way of doing the job. They can be dangerous. “Years ago when my sister died, naturally that was an upsetting time for me, so there was a period of time when I couldn’t—I didn’t feel good to be on the tower,” he said. He had to take a break.
David talked a little more as we stand on the platform. I looked around, then we got back on the elevator and began the 20-minute-long trip back down to solid ground. We picked up Justin. Slowly, the tiny trees and mountains below us got taller. The air warmed up. Things got back to normal. It was then that I started to think about what I just did. To me, the tower was this unbelievable thing. It was a destination. It was a place I won’t visit again.
To David, a tower climber who still continues to work to this day, the experience was something else. “You kinda develop a relationship with the tower if you’re on it on a regular basis. This is an old friend to me,” he said on the way down. “It’s kept me safe many, many days. It sounds silly, but you do the same thing with your car if you’ve driven it many, many miles. You wreck that car? You miss it. Some people do, I guess. I care for these towers in some way. I want to see them safe. They’ve kept me safe.”
What a fantastic well written piece which petrified me till the end. Heck, the pictures gave me vertigo.
Really enjoyed this one, Jeremy. Such good writing. Way to go to the limits to research a story. Well done!