← How to Be Anything
How to Be Anything
8. How to Be a Tower Climber
00:21:43
Climbing spaghetti noodles with veteran tower climber Brendon King
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- [00:01]
Capella University Narrator
Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu.
- [00:33]
Brendan King
Acast powers the World's best Podcasts Here's a show that we recommend.
- [00:42]
Emily McCrary
I'm Eden Scher.
- [00:43]
Brock Ciarle
And I'm Brock Ciarle.
- [00:44]
Brendan King
We played best friends on the Middle.
- [00:46]
Brock Ciarle
And became best friends in real life.
- [00:47]
Emily McCrary
We're here to rewatch the Middle with all of you.
- [00:50]
Brock Ciarle
Each week we'll recap an episode with behind the scenes stories, guest interviews, and what we think now, many years later.
- [00:55]
Emily McCrary
There'S a lot to dive into.
- [00:57]
Brendan King
So let's get to middling. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com I got up there, I hugged the tower with one arm. I'm literally holding the ladder, hugging it for dear life, scraping the rust, taking a million pictures because I can't see the angle. Trying to, trying to get the angle right. And on the way down, I happened to see the sunset because it took me quite a few hours to get up there and back down. But once I watched that sunset, I was still about 100ft in the air. And from that point forward I was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It was the most beautiful experience ever.
- [01:47]
Emily McCrary
That's Brendan king. He was 18 years old the first time he climbed a cell tower. Those giant steel structures that are everywhere but hard to notice. They're equipped with antennas that transmit and receive the signals that power cell service and the Internet. Tower climbers like Brendan install and maintain the technology that keeps those networks running. Without him, you likely wouldn't be able to do your job. You certainly couldn't send text messages and you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. You wouldn't be able to pay your bills or collect a paycheck. And you couldn't call 911. Tell me what it's like now to be on top of a tower. What does that feel like to you?
- [02:27]
Brendan King
The older I get, the more scared I get, I'm not gonna lie. And I think it's more just like a healthy respect for I don't, I don't want to die. And the older I get the more dangerous the towers get. So, you know, it's, it's a peaceful, a peaceful bliss. You know, the cool thing is I could be in the middle of a city and I'm a couple hundred feet in the air. People don't even know I'm there. They're literally walking by on the sidewalk and they have no idea that I'm up there. So you get to watch everything take place around you and no one knows you're there. So it's just like being a fly on the wall. It's pretty cool. When you're out in the farmlands, for example, you can see the grid patterns. You know, it's, it's unbelievably beautiful.
- [03:11]
Emily McCrary
This is how to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs. I'm Emily McCrary.
- [03:19]
Brendan King
I've been climbing cell phone towers for over 10 years now, all across the country. It's kind of a jack of all trades trade. One day you're hanging drywall, one day you're climbing a tower, the next day you might be working on a drainage system for a shelter. There's really no telling where you're going to be that day or what you're going to see.
- [03:37]
Emily McCrary
Cellular antennas are everywhere, not just on the tops of towers. Many of them are quite tucked away. Some are hiding in plain sight. There are a lot of different types, but you might see a grouping of vertical panels a few feet tall and about 6 to 8 inches wide. They look like gray or brown rectangles. Some look like metal cans. I spotted a group of them in my neighborhood on a phone pole only about 20ft off the ground. Next time you are out and about, see if you can spot one.
- [04:05]
Brendan King
If you've ever been inside any city halls or really, really high end hotels, you'll see what looks like a WI fi panel in the ceiling. It's actually a cell phone antenna. They're called dash systems. Sometimes those are hidden behind the drywall and sometimes you gotta punch a hole literally through the drywall and then re patch it. There's cactuses that have a rock next to it that you flip the rock over and crawl down in the vault. And there's all your equipment down there and there's a 60 foot cactus next to you out in Arizona, and all the equipment's in the Y of it. And then out in Cali, they have eucalyptus trees that are fake eucalyptus trees. They also have church steeples Here in Denver, for example, if you go downtown, you would never know it, but a lot of the buildings have Fake, like stucco walls up top and there's just antennas pointed down. I've seen some that are like intricate gargoyle systems. I've seen a whole entire church steeple that lifts up. If you ask someone, what is that tower over there? Most people wouldn't even know what it is. And even nowadays, most people don't see cell sites. They have no idea that they're just right there.
- [05:15]
Emily McCrary
Tower climbers install the technology that supports cellular networks with ever increasing speed. Think of all the GS, 4G, 5G, 6G, which will be available in about five years. That just refers to the latest cell technology. Every new G or generation can handle more devices at faster speeds. It's tower climbers who install that technology. They troubleshoot issues and they repair equipment that keeps networks and at this point our world running jobs are done through a system of tickets issued by a cell service provider like Verizon or AT&T, which then get passed through a series of contracting companies before someone like Brendan gets it.
- [05:58]
Brendan King
The first thing you're going to do is you're going to pull up to a site and you're going to assess the situation and you're going to say, this is what I need to take with me today. And then you're going to start inspecting everything that you need to inspect and you're going to head up the tower. In most cases, you're going to rig a rope and you're going to set a. We call it a block. It can also be called like a snatch block that tow truck drivers would use, but the same concept, you know, we put a block at the top of the tower and then we run a rope through it and run it back down to the ground.
- [06:24]
Emily McCrary
What he's talking about here is just how he attaches himself to the tower. There are several ways to do it, but more or less he's putting on a harness and tethering himself to the steel structure, then ascending on a ladder or series of pegs, climbing hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet.
- [06:40]
Brendan King
And then at that point, you call for your equipment to be sent up to you, whether it's a nose bag or a grunt sack, which has a. It's basically just a sack that you put all your tools into. I think they got like 150 pound weight limit on them. A lot of the times you're waiting for troubleshooting. And so there's going to be times where you've got three or four hours where you're just sitting there doing nothing, just sitting there enjoying the view at that point in time, I'm setting up my harness in a hammock and I'm taking a nap. Yeah, I take my Y lanyard, stretch them out behind me and just rest my head up against those and put my feet on something and extend my positioner out so it picks my waist up and then take a nap. But the thing is, you're 350ft in the air when you wake up. That first initial shock in 10 years, I've never gotten over it, ever.
- [07:25]
Emily McCrary
Once a job is complete, it's on to the next. Tower climbers can spend weeks or months on the road. Brendan has worked all over the US in places like Alaska, California and Colorado. His schedule is a little more forgiving now, and he gets to be home with his wife every night. But plenty of tower climbers don't get this luxury. And it certainly wasn't this way when Brendan started his career. Do you have a favorite memory of a climb?
- [07:51]
Brendan King
The Caribbean. I went down after Irma and Maria and I did the cleanup work. We showed up to site and they looked at us and said, hey, it's mandatory free climb. You're not allowed to tie off to anything until you get to your workstation because it's too dangerous.
- [08:04]
Emily McCrary
Free climbing means climbing without being clipped into any safety gear. It's incredibly dangerous and it happens more often than you might think.
- [08:13]
Brendan King
These towers were completely destroyed by the hurricanes. We're climbing over broken steel. I've got stuff dangling up above you while you're climbing under it, and you got to climb past it. There's stuff that has blown off the tower and has blown through people's living rooms. I saw a microwave dish that went through someone's whole entire house. And a microwave dish is like a ten foot round dish. Just the level of destruction was the craziest thing that I have ever seen. I saw steel that was supposed to be three feet across. And it's called the waveguide system. It's what we attach our cables to. It came unattached at the bottom, stayed attached at the top, and in the gale force winds, it turned into a candy cane. We had all of our hoists attached to palm trees down there, so every pick you would have to retighten it because it was squeezing the water out of the palm tree. And then every, like three to four picks, you would have to jump over to a new palm tree. But it was cool because I was on St Thomas and as the center point of the island on Crown Mountain and it was the tallest structure there. The island's only 17 miles across and it's like two or three miles at its widest point. I want to say you could see both ends of it. Most memorable climb for sure. And I have to say climbing at night is probably my favorite. I love night climbing.
- [09:24]
Emily McCrary
I didn't realize you could do that.
- [09:26]
Brendan King
Yeah. So a lot of the times when we're working out west, I'm not working at 120 degrees in the day. I'm going to tell my boss that I will come back at night. I had my boots melt to the concrete one time in downtown Phoenix and I walked off the job site, I was like, welcome back in the dark, dude. I'm not doing this. If you're up on in the middle of nowhere, you turn your light off up top, it's pitch black. It's literally like snorkeling at night and then turning off your light. There's nothing in front of you. But what's cool is like when there's cities around you and stuff like that, that'll take your breath away. My favorite are coastal cities climbing next to those because then you have to differentiate. Is that a boat or is that the city? And then sometimes it just looks like the boats are floating in the middle of the air.
- [10:08]
Emily McCrary
The tallest tower Brendan has climbed is 500ft. That's the height of a 50 story building. The tallest in the US is a TV broadcast tower in North Dakota. That's a little over 2,000ft. You can do that math now. It's a 200 story building that's taller than one world trade in Manhattan, which with the spire on top is just over 1700ft. Falling from that height is just one occupational hazard.
- [10:34]
Brendan King
The biggest problem out here in the summertime is thunderstorms. My personal cutoff is seven miles. If it's within seven miles, I'm going to head down the tower. And if it hit 10 miles, I'm already started on my way down. Just last week I showed up to a site and they have a peregrine falcon on top. Not climbing that, that can really hurt somebody. And they are super aggressive. So you just leave it alone. The thing is, I love the view and I love it while I'm up there. Hate the act of doing it. And any tower hand nowadays will tell you, you know, it's cool for the first 100ft or so, 200ft, and then it's just like, all right, I'm ready to get there. I'm out of breath. Like me personally, I'll do 40 foot sections, then I'LL take a break. Some people do 60 and hundreds. I'm not that physically inclined. If I'm going 250ft and this is something I'm doing on a regular basis, I should be able to get to the top of the tower, be positioned and ready for work and than 15 minutes.
- [11:31]
Capella University Narrator
At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Edu.
- [11:47]
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- [12:49]
Emily McCrary
What makes tower climbing even riskier is the way the industry is structured. At the top are big carriers like Verizon or AT&T who hand work orders to construction managers, often called turf vendors. From there, the job is subcontracted again and again, sometimes twice, maybe five times, until the climbers who actually do the work are many layers removed from the company that ordered it.
- [13:15]
Brendan King
We have entire companies in our industry that literally only exist to take 40% off the PO and give it to a company that has a crew. And that's all they do.
- [13:25]
Emily McCrary
The dangerous work of climbing towers is often awarded to the lowest bidder with little regard for training, qualifications or safety record. Layers of subcontracting mean critical details like site conditions or gear requirements get lost along the way. By the time workers are on the tower, equipment may be faulty, communication unclear and the pressure to finish fast overwhelming. Corners get cut, protocols ignored, and that's when things like free climbing happen. Too often the result is serious injury or death.
- [13:58]
Brendan King
I get it. Make your money. It's capitalism. I understand. I respect it. Even on the same token, in certain aspects, when you sub that job out six times and you have some guy that's willing to go do a $14,000 job for 2,500 bucks. There's no way he's doing it safely. There's no way. It's just not physically possible.
- [14:19]
Emily McCrary
When climbers are injured, the service providers are seldom held responsible because they're insulated by so many layers of contractors. Fatalities in the industry rose in the mid to late 2000s, when there was a rush to build out the 3G network, and again in the early 2000s with 4G. For instance, in 2006 alone, there were 19 deaths. Though there have been fewer deaths in recent years, tower climbers are agitating for better working conditions and corporate culpability. Have you ever fallen or had a close call?
- [14:53]
Brendan King
I've had a close call. I've never fallen. I've never fallen into my harness. I've never seen anyone fall into their harness. But I stepped on a pipe one day. It's called the stiff arm. There's a boom that goes off the tower. To prevent it from going side to side like this, we attach another steel pipe on the outside of it and then attach it back to the tower leg. And I stepped on that, and it was loose inside the U bolt, and it rolled on me. But I managed to grab onto the tower and I got real scared.
- [15:19]
Emily McCrary
How did that feel?
- [15:21]
Brendan King
Terrifying. I had to stop what I was doing for a couple of minutes, and just at the time, I was smoking cigarettes. I know I smoked a cigarette. And then I called down and said, okay, let's go back to work. It was terrifying. The tower is always going to move. It's always going to sway. For example, a guide tower is always going to twist back and forth when you're looking down at it. We call it the spaghetti noodle. It's supposed to do that. If it's not, it means it's leaning in one direction. All of that you're really comfortable with, so you're used to it. So when something does throw you off up there, it sometimes can take a couple minutes for you to be like, all right. No, I'm okay. I've seen guys get thrown off and just hit the dirt, and that's it. They're like, I'm done. I'm not doing this. I've had one guy freeze up to the point that it got pretty terrifying. He wouldn't let go of the tower, and we ended up having to step on his hands to get him off the tower. At that point, though, it's like a drowning victim. They panic. They can kill you, too.
- [16:17]
Emily McCrary
Do you remember your first climb?
- [16:19]
Brendan King
Oh, man. So I got super lucky. I was with my dad. My very first climb, I was with my dad and a couple of dudes that he had living with him. We show up to a 200 foot cell phone tower in Kingman, Arizona. It's, I want to say, 90 degrees out that day. It was nice and cool for Arizona. The only thing I had to do was climb up the tower, use a steel brush, scrape a piece of rust off, and hit it with some galvanizing spray. That was it. I had a digital camera that I was supposed to take a picture of it with before and after. They set me up by myself and they made me do something called lobster climbing. Lobster climbing means you take a y lanyard in each hand, you put one up here, you climb up to it, and you put the other one up above it. It was super windy, and I made it to 180ft and I froze. I was terrified. I had no idea what I was doing. I'm calling down to my dad, it's too windy. He can't hear me. And I literally told myself, I was like, dude, you asked permission to do this, and you've been begging for six years to do this.
- [17:22]
Emily McCrary
That's when Brendan saw the sunset, the one we started with. That turned him on to a career in tower climbing.
- [17:28]
Brendan King
It took me quite a few hours to get up there and back down, but once I watched that sunset, I was still about 100ft in the air. And from that point forward, I was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It was the most beautiful experience ever.
- [17:41]
Emily McCrary
It was Brendan's dad who brought him into the trade.
- [17:45]
Brendan King
He was a tower climber for a long time. When he was younger, you know, he spent some time on the fishing boats. He bounced around. In between prison and figuring out life, he worked a lot of different jobs. And then after he got out of prison, the last time, someone hit him up and said, hey, why don't you come climb towers? I think it was for like 12 bucks an hour at the time. And he had just gotten off parole, so he was like, cool, let's go. Someone asked him if he knew how to build a switch, and he lied to him and said yes. Because he took a blueprint reading class in prison.
- [18:15]
Emily McCrary
A switch is basically the electrical component that connects networks.
- [18:20]
Brendan King
But then he successfully pulled it off, him and a couple other people. And from that point forward, it slingshot his career. It was pretty interesting watching him. My stepmom traveled around with him for a while too. You were always on the Road, you might go nine to ten months without seeing your front door sometimes. But watching that, the adventure, the traveling, you know, he always had these beautiful pictures working back on the towers in Colorado. But if you have kids and you're in this industry, your kids can grow up for years without you spending actual time with them. So it's the young man's or young ladies game. Once I was probably 14 or 15, I told my dad what I wanted to do. And I was. At that point in my life, I was a. I was an idiot. I was just in and out of trouble all the time. I was working at the Wendy's at night and managing the Anthony's pizza during the day. She just hit me with a random text message saying, I have cancer. I'm dying in six months. Blah, blah, blah, carry on our name with pride. I'm like, oh, that's cool. That's not really what you do in a text message there, Pops. And he was like, well, listen, I got six months left to live. You're finally not an idiot, so why don't you come move out to California with me and join telecom? We packed up and moved out. By seven that night, we were on the road to California. Me and my brother drove through the night, wound up in San Diego. He took me to the University of Southern California, and that was my very first cell site.
- [19:41]
Emily McCrary
Brendan hadn't been in California for very long before he started fooling around again, getting in trouble. There was a group of tower climbers living with his dad at the time, and they invited him along on jobs.
- [19:52]
Brendan King
They were like, hey, why don't you come with us? I'll buy you lunch. So for two weeks, I ran their extension cords for free, and they bought me lunch every day. And then I would do much more than running extension cords. I was helping with the jackhammers, doing grout removal, doing literally anything I could to try and get a foot in the door and learn something. After two weeks, they handed me a check for $2,300 and asked me if I wanted a job.
- [20:16]
Emily McCrary
Brendan is a skilled autodidact, and he learns really well on the fly to pick up the technical parts of the job. He studied bulky device manuals in his hotel at night, and he carried around a notebook and asked questions of the more experienced climbers.
- [20:31]
Brendan King
It's a blessing and a curse, but I am oppositionally defiant. So when it comes to wanting to learn something, I refuse to not learn it.
- [20:41]
Emily McCrary
What was that six months like with your dad? Was it six months before he died?
- [20:45]
Brendan King
So he ended up living for another four or five years and he actually died by his own hand. So I spent, I want to say six weeks living with him after I actually started telecom.
- [20:59]
Emily McCrary
Do you feel like that was good for your relationship or was it just more of, I don't know, just something that got you into the industry?
- [21:06]
Brendan King
Our relationship was one of those ones that was always much better from a distance. The second we got together we just debauchery, absolute debauchery came about. It was not okay, but it did. It definitely brought us closer together because, you know, I didn't even meet him until I was 11. So there was that whole getting to know each other phase and then having the common ground of working in the same industry. It really helped draw us closer together.
- [21:39]
Emily McCrary
Are you a risk taker outside of work?
- [21:42]
Brendan King
Yes.
- [21:43]
Emily McCrary
Tell me more.
- [21:44]
Brendan King
So just the way I grew up, my brain is wired differently than most people. I have to have outside thrills to, you know, I'm not going to feel alive, I'm going to get really bored, I'm going to go do stupid things or otherwise. I, I feed my own addictions with adrenaline. That's how I like to look at it. Whether it's skydiving, skateboarding. This year I plan on actually getting my skydiving license out here in Denver. You know, I want to get into rock climbing.
- [22:08]
Emily McCrary
Why do you think you need that kind of thing?
- [22:13]
Brendan King
From a very, very, very, very, as in like age of 2 years old, taking heavy duty stimulants and multiple pills, just that heavy medication throughout the years. You know, I've got 14 years of counseling under my belt. And one of the things that we've come up with is my brain was wired early on for synthetic interaction. And the only way that I have found to really appease that is stepping outside of the comfort zone a little bit. It's not just always adrenaline junkie things. Some of that can be like going and finding new things that you've never tried before, food wise. Always looking for the exploration of something new in any way, shape or form.
- [22:56]
Emily McCrary
What do you like about your job?
- [22:57]
Brendan King
I love the adventure. Every single day is something new. You never know where you're going to be. You don't know what's going to happen. I can be doing my thing, thinking I'm going to get off work at 3 o' clock in the afternoon and get a phone call. I need you to be in Montana by 7 o' clock o' clock tomorrow morning. And then you're driving all night and then you're out there and then you see a beautiful sunrise, you do something and then you're back in Denver that night. It's a constant adventure no matter how you look at it. And I I've been in places where people have lived there their entire lives and they've never once seen the view that I get to see. It's amazing.
- [23:35]
Emily McCrary
How To Be Anything is created and written by me, Emily McCrary. Our producer is Lily I. Johnson and our editor is Kaiden Boffman. Visual design by Nika Simovich Fisher at Labud. You can learn more about tower climbers and the tower climbing industry at our substack howtobeanything.com or on Instagram howtobenything. We also publish outtakes from interviews and behind the scenes looks at how the show is made. We're an indie podcast, so show us your support by rating and reviewing the show wherever you listen. And if you like how to Be Anything, text it to a friend.
- [24:21]
Brock Ciarle
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- [24:46]
Brendan King
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- [24:51]
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- [25:21]
Capella University Narrator
Learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the courseroom to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.