Got abandoned bunker network. They're building underground village

See right there that hole over there, that flat area with all the pipes coming up to it? That is an underground bunker. That bunker was good I think for about 250 people. There are 46 bunkers in the area. So see that big metal thing? That is a turret. Steps on the other side of it, but it's a huge underground bunker. See all the pipes coming up? I've been in there. It's an underground figure eight. On the other side of that cement slab is a big door, and then you walk down that hallway down to the others. Crazy. Here's another example of a local bunker. Here's a bit more primitive. That appears to be a train car. You can see some vents up there, and I guess that would be the main area. I don't want to go too much further because it is private property, and people are a little particular up here. Right across the way is a very large one. You can see all the containers lined up. Yeah, they're still active. I guess they're always prepared. This is another bunker. Some of the original people still here. You can see all the buckets of food outside this one. Maybe they're cleaning them out. Everybody had to have a spot in a fallout shelter. It was actually in the HOA documents, and that's a large bunker underground, and there was another one. Yeah, you can see it from here. He turned that one into a business. That's the front door. What an incredible area here. It doesn't make much sense to be going underground when that's your front porch. Yellowstone Park is about 25 miles that way. How did I get at Paradise Valley, Montana? This is crazy. I was fishing here, and I said, oh my god, Paradise Valley. Most beautiful spot in the world, I think. So, six months later, I started looking for property, and it seemed like everything else was in the stratosphere here. Because I ended up coming across a for sale by owner, when this guy was selling a shelter. So, you've got the dome underneath the dirt. The main area. The chicken coop back here, and then you can see part of two 1,000 gallon tanks off to the left, where they would keep fresh water and so forth. The barrels, which there were 120 of them, were strewn throughout the bunker, and the barrels are actually used for food storage. I asked what a shelter was, and he says, well, it's where people go to get away from nuclear fallout. A decontamination chamber, an air filtration system. That's where the fire comes up, and that is the mound. And it is essentially 4,500 or 5,000 square foot cement igloo. That is the cement down there. That's the top. If you hit this in here, you can hear the whole thing echo through the entire house, because it's all connected with cement slab. Here is the dome room. Came in through the round hole in the wall. So, this is the top of the building. You can see the lighting. That's the main light up here. And there is the emergency hole, which was covered up, which, if you're running from the nuclear stuff, I just figured you might want to cover all your doors and windows. The window that we saw inside a minute ago is right here. You have any 27-year-old raisins or rice? I've actually got about 10 tons of it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Let me go get you some. I'll be right back. Okay, bye-bye. When I got here, I realized there was 45,000 pounds of food in the basement. He looks like he's coming out of the dungeon out of the hole. It's all brain storage. Look at that, wild. They were stocked up with enough food, medicine. This is the medicine cabinet. Air, supplies, you name it, to stay under there for several years. Anyway, untouched, 20 years. The apocalypse is here. When I first saw this place, I was like, man, I do not know. And then I thought, hmm, this giant cement shell was like one of the cool ones. Basically, to me, it was like a million or million and a half dollars worth of cement stuck underground with all this old food and all this old other stuff, which made me salivate. I was thinking, wow, all this leftover stuff, gone. They're going to bury it so I can buy it for next to nothing and turn it into something cool. Generally, I try to buy things that nobody else wants. And so I'm looking, I'm trying to bottom feed, really, to try to find something that we can work on. All right, come on in. That I'm not going to get beat up on money-wise, and that we're going to have some fun with. We wanted the bunker to have kind of a hobbit house feel to it. So we had the guys bring in rocks over and over and over. Lots of rocks here in Montana. So we're going to finish covering this up and make it look like the lower area of the bunker is actually embedded in rocks or a quarry. The rocks keep the erosion from happening. It had three inches of cement to keep out the nuclear dust. So the window and the door were the only way into the whole thing. So come on in. This is the main room for living, okay? This would have been a decontamination chamber. What that is, is it's some place to squirt off dust off of you that is from spending time outside. And then once the person was squirted down, the juice or whatever in the water with the contaminants on it would go underground. So there's another 3,000-gallon septic tank, which is directly under the kitchen. They have food stored in it. So we're currently helping the folks move out of the bunker. They just showed us another spot here. There's six-gallon cans of wheat. I'll come down there and help you. It's like going under your cabinet. Yeah, here we go. I don't know where that hole goes, but there's a lot of potential bread right here. So there's another septic tank. It's directly under the kitchen. We cut it open, and I am using it for a geothermal. It's about 53 degrees down there all the time. So we pull cool air out of it in the summer, and we add cool air to it in the winter. So I took a mini-split AC unit. We raised up the condenser down in there. And the mini-split, it's got 25-foot lines that go down into this hole. Bunker redneck geothermal concept is turned into reality. We hope it works. The issue would be turning the air over down there enough. So we have a four-inch pipe getting blown into it and a four-inch pipe getting blown out. That's what that pipe does outside, and it's hooked up to a switch. So it's constantly turning the air over down in that 3,000-gallon septic tank down there. Put the mini-split up high enough to heat and cool the whole room, and it really, really works great. As you can see from the roof here, from the original bunker, the cement, it's about 13 inches of cement above us, and this was just the entryway to the main bunker. Wood stove used to be right here, and we put in our little geothermal mini-split, and then we needed some place to sleep here, so we just added these two rooms. And we're constantly finding new stuff. Like, this was here, and why would they need a flame thrower? Is there any reason why? We use it as a doorstop. This is where there was a big door that kept the distance between the decontamination chamber and the living area. This is one of my old mug shots here. As you can see, when I was young and dumb, screaming at the policemen. A long time ago, I was kind of going nowhere, and my future looked bleak, and an old man took me under his wing, and he said, I can give you a set of tools. You know what? I can show you a path where you can straighten your life up. How are we coming, fellas? And I am really just playing it forward. We just had the boys dig a hole up in the top and find out how far down it actually is. So this is the actual side of the bunker that we're going to cut into. We use projects as a catalyst to help young addicts and alcoholics change their lives. It's what was done for me. Below that dirt is a dome of 10-inch reinforced concrete that's waterproof. This is where he is right now on this turn. We just marked it with that pink lettering there. And remember, big hole is going to go right there. Cut the rebar. As the years have gone on, I have basically narrowed it down to looking for unique projects in unique places where I use some of the fellas that we've taken through this process in the past. We use them to run a crew. We get a new crew every summer. Sometimes they're fresh out of prison, sometimes right off the street. What we're looking for is someone with a great big crack down the middle of them. So their ego has been beat up. Their mind is open to change. Because that's where I was. 30 plus years ago when the old man took me under his wing, he put me to work doing physical labor and tasking me with helping others and staying busy. I need you to stand by. I'm going to stand right on by. I'm going to stand right by this wall y'all built. Right. So I found out that being in a new place, sweating a lot, using your body physically and doing it alongside some good people that have great ideas about living can change a person. And this is what I was talking about Reed. If we had a trough right now. And they've got to put their guard down and we get some crazy dudes like I used to be. Yeah my problem is I'm so used to so much chaos in my life. But we take them under our wing and we teach them how to use the tools that were given to us and we try to break them down in this unique atmosphere under hard work and get them to open their minds. You're busiest. You know you don't have time to do anything. You're always moving. You don't even have time to shower sometimes. Yeah meeting. Yeah you gotta you just gotta go. You're always going. So my life slowed down so much. Oh that's great man. I can't even tell you guys couldn't handle it. This is a modified version of the blueprints. This is the area where we are right now. This is the entry to the living area. The bunker. And this is from the top down. So if we look at it from the side this is all cement right here. Then when I saw it what went through my mind is there's a million dollars worth of cement in the ground. So can I use this as a deck for this? And my answer was yes. So this is the dome. This is the house I wanted to add to it. Where I could get sun during the winter. A little bit like an earth ship. Keep the upstairs heated because it's such a huge space. And keep the whole main structure intact. And I could combine the outside and the inside to utilize the old structure with the modern conveniences of what a new structure can offer. And really pay homage to the what they did here. The faith that they had in building this crazy thing. But yet in a practical way use it to be a foundation for a new house. We've got the big cement pour finished. They are putting up the walls going up the side of the bunker right now. The next thing to go in are the six by sixes which will hold the roof up. Well looking good guys. So I came up with the idea I want to come up with a new home. Lay it over the old one where I can combine the two for some only one in the world project of something from the nuclear arms race. Leftover sort of thing. Coming in the final runway of the walls here. You guys got the ceiling all nice and tight? So tight. Well let's head upstairs now. So this is 2,500 bags of quick creep. We have made this hallway. We cut it down deep enough where we had access to the second floor here. But yet gives us enough light and it brings us up to the third floor combining these two spaces. We put all this tile down this summer. It ended up matching beautifully. This is the main room where we are combining the internal space of the bunker. You can see the dome that they originally made and cut up with the exterior that we added on. So just like downstairs we cut up this with saws. We're going to wire it inside and smooth it out. We didn't want it to be absolutely perfect. We want it a little bit rough. It's just to keep the whole idea of it. And we split it like this so we could leave the main support beams on the inside. You can see that. The engineers said we probably don't need those anymore. This ain't so strong. This is the internal parts. So this used to be the meditation room, the church room, the nursery, the diner, everything. So if you can imagine this room with no windows, totally dark, and this dome ceiling. And that was it. So if you notice we have taken sky blue paint with a slight, a little more white in it maybe and then we added bright white bulbs to it with a little blue tint to try to get the feeling that you're outside. It's almost like the sky. I may eventually make it even a little bit brighter but we wanted to give it a feel of being in the outdoors even though we can see the mountains from right here. We also wanted to keep the place in respect and because that's what it is, we wanted to keep it kind of like a bunker or a shelter or a nuclear fallout shelter. So we went with a lot of aluminum, a lot of grays. We went with the pad and I found old chairs that kind of fit the time period and even this table. These young guys and with a little bit of training we made all the furniture. We made the table, we made this, the paint and everything, cabinets and so forth. So we went and bought 316 sheets of stainless steel and strapping and we found these little button type roof screws and built the tables ourselves keeping it kind of gray. We found a church bench, repurposed it, painted it, sanded it, painted it, made it look as if it were used by the church here and it turned out to be beautiful and this allows people to sit and slide in and sit back in there without hitting your head too much but it allows us to utilize more of the room. But we made the table two people wide on both ends to get more folks in and to push togetherness and family which is what this place ultimately will be about. We had to go with a horizontal freezer and fridge because we can't stand anything up here. Can't even put anything on the walls. So this ended up working great extra space and on the other side we put a large three-door freezer refrigerator which works well and then this great big 10 foot by 5 foot deck to cut it out for a six-band stove, a six-ice stove in it and again goes back to institutional feel. We wanted it stainless steel, we want people to feel like wow we're really in a closed area with a lot of stainless steel and it's for cooking for large groups. We have three sinks, one foot deep sinks with two faucets and we want to keep that whole idea. The half window here was actually their escape hole which we found buried in the side that most people didn't know about. It was a little hatch for I guess the secret getaways. So we cleaned that, we put some cement down there to put it also to help get the water to go away. You see those stones that are outside they are actually from the property and they are petrified wood. I just found this one yesterday. Kind of crazy, almost looks like a branch doesn't it? But it is, it's a piece of wood that is I don't know how many millions of years old but they're all over the property. So we took this and I swooped it back in as far as I could, made this out of stainless steel as well and then hooked up all our plumbing and also brought in the gas line through here for the stove. So we had to have some way to get groceries and that kind of stuff to the kitchen so we made a mudroom. We used the same tile up here, we came up with a little orange church bench and again we used steel off the grain bin, welded it in place here, put wire and put other cement in here to smooth off this whole thing and kind of rubberized paint again to seal it a little bit and we had to go you know build these little baffles sticking up to keep the dirt and the soil outside. And then we went with a pine plumbing roof and with this we put two coats of a gray stain on it that is really good stuff that'll make it last a long time but gives it this gray feel so it matches up with the cement and our other colors more. Almost all of our paint here came from thrift stores or was here. Some of the paint's 20 years old but it's holding up. The medical center was we made the room a little bit bigger just to squeeze that bedroom in. We put this kind of a porthole here not a long skinny window just to let some natural light go in there and then right across from it we enlarged this little storage facility and put a tiny bathroom in here. We tried to keep the natural curve of the dome intact and the cement is probably about 10 inches thick there. You can certainly feel the coolness that's about three or four feet of soil above this spot but we cut the burlap and the wire off and then used masonry cement here trying to keep it rough and we want to make it look too smooth and unnatural. This almost looks like the original cement and then we took some paint that's got some that's like a rubberized paint and we're going to do another coat next year just to cover it which helps keep the moisture on the far side. We left these I-beams here and we used the brown paint to really kind of make them pop a little bit and stand out to let you know hey we are inside of this dome you know it's actually a bedroom in here and the brown mixes with the other paints that we have and some of the furniture we had. Bathroom we're a good bit done with again same sort of paint over here and a little smoother texture here just because there's such a small space that you're right in your face so we put an extra layer on there and we had to take this tiny area with a sloped wall and fit in the toilet and we put this here so your head won't hit as you're sitting down. We had to put an exhaust fan on the side because there's essentially no ceiling in here and it takes it back into that chamber and the stand-up shower we had to go with something really small that fits really well it's kind of cool right into the I-beam there and we tried to leave as much of it as original as possible a lot of the doors a lot of the vents and so forth are left a lot of frames so and right across the hall so it's very comfortable and the kitchen's right here it's really great we like it we like it very very comfortable. The ceiling is also reclaimed galvanized metal from the grain elevator the chandelier is a reclaimed natural gas storage tank that cut the end of it off and made this chandelier. I wanted to get the flavor of Montana still here because that's really where we are and right in the middle of that you know Elk Country right next to the park. I've got my regular job is done right over here and it's fantastic. You can also see this bar across top where I put that iron bar to hold to spread the weight across that whole dome so the weight of all the wet snow when it comes up here doesn't push down so we did calculations on how much six foot of wet snow could weigh and made sure the whole thing could hold it. I don't think it's a place where they can stop and sit here and be able to view the mountain and enjoy it. We put in one large durable eating area and we've got new chairs here for now and as you can see the absolute beauty of this spot and this is exactly why we would take the inside this thing was built for spiritual purposes and combine it with a building on the outside so we can see that because to me viewing that that's a spiritual experience. So if you can imagine a three-story cement igloo that had a little tunnel going to the second floor this here is a little tunnel and you see this is the bathroom here this is one that was here that they put in curved walls and the person that lived here this is the one that he used this was here where they originally put it in and when we got here the doors were all piled up all the electricity you know like you can see but they were finished so this was a bedroom across the hall about a hundred of these things but this room will be totally gone eventually but this when he lived here this is just what they had people from all over the world became part of the church so and if they didn't believe that I would not have gotten a great deal on the bunker that I got so thank you all right this is the basement you can see just how serious they were these are earthquake plates super super well built metal bars holding the two foundations from splitting just everything's overbuilt you can see this is four beams thick right here you can see this ring would have been a 55 gallon drum full of dried fruit food nuts all in all it was 45,000 pounds of food that he left time to get the remains of the food and stuff out of the basement so our homemade conveyor trying to do it in a labor efficient manner and also we don't have to trek it through the bunker the only thing that he took was honey soy sauce pickles or vinegar and buckwheat which is going to be the new magical grain that humanity will live off of in the future he said and this was completely full so I'm going to put a shot down here move the washer and dryers and eventually seal off the dirt and the soil if I don't use it for geothermal for this part of the house we might do the same thing put mini splits one downstairs and two upstairs and just run them here and then have fresh air blown in here which is the tough thing to make a hole you know to find a space to get air down here because right now we're about 20 feet underground so that's the basement down the hallway for the sleeping quarters this is where one person is staying now but this would have been 12 to 14 people packed in here the bunks everything was marked out the bunks went right here all the way up it's amazing how they had them crammed in here and they had it broken down to children how tall your children are if your children were smaller then you got a discount and how much a family would be but it was all totally worked out this is downstairs so four rooms we're going to increase the size to reduce the number we're going to put three rooms and three bedrooms here and try to use the walls that are here and those doors we're just going to slide it down this door and then we'll make this room bigger here so this room 12 to 14 people would have been in it which is insane to me and i don't even know how much oxygen that many people would use but this is going to be two-thirds of one room downstairs bathroom look at this i find this really interesting page wire that's stiff stuff used for cement plus burlap and then behind it is a layer of plastic behind that they would wire in a row of 5h rebar which is pretty thick and then beyond it a layer of 3h that far 5h is about that far 3h is about that far from here and then they laid it on this giant burl cage do you see that square beam up there they bolted that into these curved eye beams to make the frame to lay this on top of so a huge dome with the internal frame holding it up until the cement hardened so that's amazing i don't know how much of a cost to to put this thing in today but it's nuts and they were very thorough with it and they overbuilt the poop out of it it's nuts we used it in the laundry room they had a giant water system in here which we're still using had three showers and some more back here we're going to make this it's going to have an area you can go into the shower and have your own little area to change in so it's a room within a room we're going to do that three showers and three toilets so the air from here gets pulled out into the hole upstairs blown up through the back of the bathroom and out that vent so it pulls the moist air and the stuff the fan blows over there i think we have 20 of these and this stuff is like cleansing stuff it's like 50 bucks a gallon tons of it 500 gallons of other stuff and then more what is it melaleuca tough and tender but so many gallons of this stuff everybody wanted to contribute to the bunker back then we've got a saying here when we bring kids in and we say hey go find me a back scratcher or go find me a fly swatter uh see if you can find me a battery tester whatever they find them and there's an old saying the bunker will provide so which it does anyway so we have many things left besides the furniture and all the equipment we had lots and lots of food but we still eat lots and lots of mung beans they were way ahead of their time they had no idea that this would be the main ingredient in possible burgers so we still make a lot of mung beans and uh and hundreds of these things this is a 45 pound sealed container of rice a little bit of everything and it's endless of what's here we still use that too 32 years old do i tell the kids maybe not they don't even know the difference when i'm making thai or here's my favorite i don't even know how this is possible margarine really margarine powder just to have water any of those sesame oil probably we threw away probably 200 of those and then lots of olive oil this stuff's all bad it's more or less better for decoration i get so excited about the leveraging resources that are sitting there which is my nature for your dice dice and cabbage not to buy new stuff and how can i use this for something in the future we pay the kids a decent wage during the summer so we try to not give them the money so they have something at the end of the money when they get restarted with the car or whatever we pay for them to get out here we pay for all the food and we take them to a meeting every single night but they gotta do the work that we're asking them to do make sure you don't get under it or stay away from it oh my god there it goes we have about 40 kids through here the bulk of which are clean and healthy and doing well you got it going yeah and sometimes it takes a minute but what we do here at mac for gals so this is the top of the bunker here when they originally buried it they had a chicken coop back here and i didn't want to leave the chicken coop so what i did was took a container 40-foot container and cut the doors out of it and welded made doors on both sides so i could drive through as you've seen and then we took train car doors we had a pile of them over at the dump and slid them all the way down along the side two containers is going to go there prior to that we took tires packed earth tires and made a wall of them all the way through because they didn't want the container to get fallen in on so we put the doors in eventually we're going to cover these up with earth but i kind of i kind of like this scary look at it here we moved it back here and turned it into our shop this is a brand new load of tires right here we're going to flatten that out dig it down put the tires in fill the tires with dirt pile more dirt on it to keep the heat and the cold from getting into the bunker from the outside these are two fans pulling air constant flow of air pulling through the bunker just to creating a slight vacuum down there it pulls up this one is for the vents from all of the septic and this one is from the bathrooms and it just generally puts up to one cavity and then it pulls out but soil with the insulation of tires is a very very effective insulator and we're looking forward to uh it being a little warmer in there this winter of course we're not living here full time yet so this helps the water go away from the bunker and then this is what the rocks on the far side will eventually look like to create a distance between the cement and the exterior should be well insulated down it has been one hell of a ride with this thing and five summers so far the real impetus the energy behind this thing is to help others