Of its history I know very little. According to my sister it was still in operation when she moved to Fayetteville, back in the late eighties (or was it 1990?), thereabouts. I know that by the time I arrived here, in ’93, it had closed its doors for the last time. Apparently it was put up for sale more than once, but either no one could afford it or, more likely, no one could afford to renovate it. The last story that I’d heard was that it had been purchased but then foreclosed upon after the purchaser failed to come through with even a single payment.

I was first drawn to the building because of its height. Around here, seven stories is a fairly tall building and I do like being up high. Further, it was almost absurdly easy to get to the top, with a parking garage ascending up five of those stories and a good, solid metal stairway running up most of the rest. For that final leap a metal ladder was conveniently placed to allow us complete access. On my first visit my friend Clint and I went and played jazz brass (me on sax and him on trombone) into the night, and it was exceptionally enjoyable.

The top of the building is fascinating. Though situated downtown, it is also adjacent to death alley. The businesses along the nearby streets are almost all eight to fivers, and even the bars don’t generate a lot of traffic. It’s right across from many of the older historic buildings and this creates a fascinating dichotomy of emotion for the urban climber, being at once exposed and isolated. At night (which is the only time I ever go), the uninhibited wind helps mute the noise of the city in a manner reminiscent of the surf on the coast, and the surrounding buildings betray no hint of activity. Everything is silent and still except for that faint breeze and the occasional automobile gliding, silently to our ears, down the highway. The clock tower across the street glows with dull light and every so often a pigeon might catch you off guard.

In the first years of its abandonment, the owners, whomever they may be (probably one of the local banks) hired people to live there. I would have loved such an opportunity, living at the top of a large abandoned hotel, one floor entirely to yourself, with no responsibility other than to keep annoying people like myself from clambering about the premises, but alas, I was never able to take advantage of the offer. For a long time, however, those that had proved a thorn in our sides. They made entrance into the hotel almost impossible and cut short any rooftop visits performed in conditions other than total silence and dead of night. In this way, the hotel held out hope, for several years, that someday it would be revived. The halls stayed comparatively clean, the electricity remained on, the rooms remained inspected.

In the end, someone must have finally had to stare the bleak truth in the eye. The Mountain Inn was a done deal, a dead horse, a failed gambit. One day, the guards were pulled and the tower abandoned. Shortly after that, all hell broke loose.

Those that know of my exploits might be aware that I took a year long hiatus from roof topping after my arrest for said. It wasn’t until I had cleared up the various warrants for my arrest and other legal issues that I finally felt it safe to resume that most loved of activities. And so it was that my friend Nathan and I resumed our trips atop the Mountain Inn. To our surprise and delight, the rooftop access was now unlocked and unguarded.

What we found was nothing short of amazing. We had managed entrance a couple of times in prior years and had always, during our brief explorations, found essentially exactly what we’d expected. A fairly well kept if sparse hotel, with rooms still intact and awaiting refurbishing, missing only the outer layer, like sheets and boring paintings to feel, once more, like your typical hotel room. Sure a couple of windows were broken, but that was about it.

Everything had changed. In that year, having discovered the building to be unmanned, the local communities of skaters, punks, hicks and probably every single other group of adventurous adolescents that knew of the place had gone in and, well, it’s hard to describe. To say they destroyed everything is fairly accurate, but you miss the grandness of the scale. It's better to compare the environment to some of the more disturbing hotel scenes from the movie ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’

Glass and mirrors smashed, beds overturned and torn up, tables broken, even the metal framework holding the ceiling tiles now partially pulled down in places, this static symphony of chaos spread through the entire hotel and the emotional effect, especially late at night with only the faint blue glow of the street lights trickling in the windows for illumination, was deliciously disquieting, to say the least.

The third story sported a large cement deck with a pool. The pool, of course, was empty of water, but enterprising young miscreants had made a good show of filling it with other things like lamps, televisions, bed frames and the like, often hurled from the roof (I contributed a folding chair and a large cinder block.) Each room was, in its own way, unique, with some being in states so orderly that we wondered if vagrants or spies hadn’t been using them as makeshift homes. Others made no sense. One was bare except for a pile of cheap metal pendants and lockets spilled across the carpeting. One was entirely covered in broken glass, far more glass than the room itself could have generated. Still another had a table and several chairs arranged in it, as if for a meeting or poker game.

On the second floor was the restaurant, once a nice affair, part morning diner part barroom. In this room the weight of the chaos came down on your shoulders as you stared at pillars, once covered from floor to ceiling in mirrors, now broken and intimidating, surrounded by shards of silvered glass. Piles of wood and sheet rock sat stacked or tossed in odd locations. Old phones and chairs lay piled in corners. Mangled books were scattered everywhere. The ceiling fans dangled at strange and horrible angles from the rafters.

The bar was largely untouched, the mirror behind it left oddly intact, as if that one piece had struck each and every one of the little heathens as fundamentally untouchable. Along the back, most telling of all, rested several dusty volumes regarding bankruptcy law. A large round table stood level and proud, surrounded by a thick layer of wreckage. I stared at it, the first time I saw it, and felt as if the history of the entire building, now come to an end, was trying to get my attention.

The bottom levels were the most entertaining and confusing. During one trip, for by now we were in the habit of taking everyone we could convince to go on tours, we opened a door to find ourselves on a roof above Death Alley, wedged between the buildings, facing what looked to be a large air conditioning and/or circulation unit and pissing ourselves as a flock of pigeons burst into flight all around us.

The building leaves you with a feeling of the beauty of destruction. Most people seem to understand, on some instinctive, lower brain level, the need for mortality, for destruction. The old must be cleared to make way for the new. Perpetual expansion allows no room for innovation or exploration. Recession must occur to allow for alteration. It’s an amazing, unique sort of excited reverence, then, when we witness something in the last stages of existence, when something grand and fantastic sits, unmoving for a time in order for us to observe and respect it in the last moments before it vanishes forever from all but memory.

The fascination can be found everywhere, and is associated with our fascination with death. While we fear our own mortality and don’t often like to be reminded of it, we are particularly taken with people and things that represent that most relevant of sacrifices. Graveyards of all sorts, from human to railroad to elephant to plane, venerable people, abandoned houses, ancient dead trees, these things serve to remind us of everything through the entire history of existence that has given itself up so as to give the rest of reality a chance to burst forth.

This, then, is the Mountain Inn, the carcass of a giant through which we pick our way, lost in thoughts of the nature of impermanence. We learn lessons of philosophy from these dark and desecrated haunts that can’t be taught from books or stories or the experience of others. We come to understand, in some shadowy yet precise manner, one of the underlying rules of our existence, especially as it relates to us. But not in any manner that makes us feel weak or fleeting. Rather, we feel more alive knowing that life is limited, and seek to leave a space worth occupying when we eventually vanish.

I recently learned that the Mountain Inn has been scheduled for demolition. In a way, this is more heartbreaking than the closing of a favorite restaurant or leaving of a close friend. It’s one of the ley lines of my development, and its lose, to me, though inevitable, exists almost in contrast to its nature. Its existence and meaning for me revolved around its own inevitable destruction, and yet the loss of that symbol becomes the permanency that the building itself could never achieve. When these things are finally gone, the final lesson is that permanence can only be found in loss, and it’s this paradox that makes the exploration of such places so appealing to me, the endless energy created by the contrast and conflict, the enlightenment and punchline that make up the two sided nature of destruction.