This is a story about a uranium millionaire, an ancient redwood forest, a fallout shelter, and a man named Earthworm.

In the course of our explorations, we spent dozens of hours researching dead ends– ghost towns now at the bottom of reservoirs, abandoned mental hospitals now parking lots, forgotten cabins labeled as a question mark on a map. We grew used to disappointment– the more exciting a site sounded in research, the less hope we had of ever seeing in person. But in all of the hundred-odd sites we came across in the first five years of urbex, none would prove so tantalizing as the Vernon J. Pick Laboratories.

We first heard of the Laboratories mentioned off-handedly in the course of our research, as a side note in the history of the redwood forests in the area of Los Gatos and Santa Cruz. A certain building, the Welch-Hurst house, built in 1908, and a popular hostel in the 70s, came up several times. The history of the building included an interesting footnote:

In the 1950s a man named Pick lived in the log style house. Mr. Pick had discovered Uranium in the west (Wyoming or Colorado) and sold his claim to the U.S. military earning several million dollars at the time. With part of his fortune he bought “Welch-Hurst” and he renamed it “Walden West.” The name was derived from the book, “Walden,” by author, philosopher, and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau.

Armed with this intriguing piece of information, we began to dig a little deeper. And what we found was practically radioactive. A newspaper article only a few years old had been written on Pick.

The lab worked on prospecting and radiation detection equipment and in using electronics in automation. He was rather reclusive and at one point owned his own island. He named the Saratoga site Walden West. He also built Walden North in British Columbia, Canada. Ironically, both locations had atomic bomb shelters. Today there is a small mining pick monument dedicated to Vernon Pick in 1955 on Earthquake Trail

A USGS overview of the San Andreas Fault provided a few more clues.

Mr. Pick named the land Walden West, and for a time developed an underground uranium ore testing facility and bomb shelter farther up the road (this underground structure was later sealed off and abandoned for public safety concerns)

This was getting interesting fast– a reclusive millionaire inventor, a mysterious symbol, an underground laboratory, and an atomic bomb shelter. We looked around for more. A bit of research turned up a Popular Mechanics Article written about Pick in July of 1960.

Nested among sexist advertisements for tobacco products and instruction manuals for do-it-yourself projects was an aerial photograph of part of the property and a captivating description of the laboratories– in enough detail, we hoped, to pinpoint the location exactly on a satellite map.

The laboratory itself occupies a long, low building on 900 acres of leveled-off hilltop near the small town of Saratoga, Calif.

At first, we assumed the case was nearly cracked– with a description and a few square miles it must lie inside of, along with google earth, how long could it be before we had the coordinates in hand? Unfortunately, we had forgotten one important thing: Redwood trees.

The Redwood forest of the Los Gatos – Santa Cruz gap contains some of the tallest trees in the world, and they grow so closely together that the satellite imagery provides about as much information as the surface of the ocean provides about the seafloor. Even with topographical maps, our research was frustratingly vague and imprecise. A leveled-off hilltop? We didn’t have the historical maps to compare the modern data with, and even if we did, we scarcely had the time to compare every contour. After all our work, it seemed that the Laboratories were out of reach.

It was at this point that our explorations took us to that area, chasing another lead– the Pourroy Ranch Cabins. By chance, we passed a moss-covered stone pillar with a curious symbol carved into it– a capital P superimposed on a mining pick.

We were thrown back into a fury of investigation. We made contact online with a man who grew up in Saratoga, and had heard rumors of a fallout shelter somewhere in the redwoods, but had no idea if it was real, or where it might be. We poured over the topographical maps, the satellite imagery, the tantalizing clues scattered across the footnotes of the region. Nothing.

It was at this point that we met a man named Earthworm. While volunteering in the park for a week as a part of an elementary school science camp, we came across a man who claimed to not only know of the Laboratories, but had actually been inside of them.

It wouldn’t be for a period of several months until we had the opportunity to take up once more our search for the Laboratories, but the day came. Shortly before we went our separate ways to different universities, we gathered a few enthusiastic friends, and set out, the testimony of Earthworm echoing in our ears– or would have, but unfortunately we had forgotten to write it down.

After a good deal of frustrating wrong turns and false memories, we pieced the directions back together, Humpty-Dumpty-like, and found ourselves once again on the more interesting side of a fence we might not have been, technically speaking, allowed to jump.