The Summit of Round Lake!

In my continuing quest to visit all of Round Lake, I hit one the tallest thing in the village yesterday! I climbed the water tower coached by our Director of Public Works Davis Clark.

I choose this water tower in the downtown because according to Davis it has railing at the top! Much safer in my mind! The basics of the water tower are 500,000 gallon (opps 750,000) storage with a height of 165 feet.

To climb the tower you go up four flights of stairs to the landings. To make sure you don't plunge to your untimely demise there is a safety harness that hooks into a ratchet system that hooks onto a metal tube that runs up and down the center of the stairs. You have to lean back and apply pressure to the harness to make the ratchet move up or down. If you move off that angle the ratchet won't open and you are restricted to a fall of maybe a foot. I did not attempt to test that out however.

When I got into the tower I was confronted with this type of ladder. If you look closely you can see the metal bar running up the ladder where you hook the harness on. This is the final climb through the ball in a nice tube. One of the climbs was in the gloom, and that was not nice ascending or descending. I did not look up once or look down either, just at the next rung and kept moving.


After about 15 minutes of steady climbing I neared the summit, my sherpa Davis had gone on ahead to open the hatch and he snapped the above picture. At this point even though I was smiling I was panting! I was also recalling my last experience with a Ferris wheel in Lindenhurst and my extreme dislike of heights. Suprisingly when I made it to the top stepping out on the top was remarkedly easy.

I am not sure if this is a smile or a grimace, it might actually be me gasping for breath. Although I think it was harder going down then up. I am going to post more about what I saw on the tower in another post. I was not going to write on the actual ascent but everyone I told about this was more interested in what's inside the tower rather then what I saw. So you get what you ask for.