Escape to Alcatraz

Sometimes when you finally get to do something you've always wanted to, there's the potential for it to disappoint. Not this time. San Francisco is an amazing place, but visiting Alcatraz, the most notorious island prison in American history, was an unforgettable experience. The Rock is easily visible from shore.

A short ferry ride from Pier 33 and it looms up before you. You feel like you're about to set foot on The Island of Doctor Moreau, or some lost Nazi experimental compound.

Because it's a National Park, great care has been taken to leave much of the facility exactly as it was when it closed down in the early sixties. It was a Civil War prison, back in the 1800's, before becoming the one basket meant to hold all the rotten eggs.

It has an eerie feeling to it. Even though fierce winds rip across it from the bay, the place has a strange quiet, broken occasionally by the fog horn echoing across the water.

The guard tower still looks down, ever vigilant.

Many of the outbuildings are in ruins - this was the Warden's house...

...but the prison itself is in remarkably solid shape. It's a strange feeling to step inside...

First, the showers...

Be careful with the soap.

"Welcome to Broadway..."

All the comforts of home.

Three square meals a day...

A well-stocked kitchen...

One of the most amazing placed is the exercise yard. Immortalized in Clint Eastwood's Escape from Alcatraz (which actually filmed there), the massive concrete steps of the "bleachers" where your status determined where you sat. It's a large, open, windswept space. It was very empty the day we went there. You feel like someone's watching you.

I had the priviledge of getting to sit on those steps - a real treat.

"D Block," where they kept the worst of the worst. D Block contained the isolation cells. "The Hole" was for the most dangerous and violent convicts, kept locked in there 24 hours a day, often in total darkness.

What madness and desperation must have happened in here.

Even Big Al did time on The Rock.

While no one can say for sure, some men did escape - at least, they were never found again. The bay is brutally cold and full of sharks. But some men tried anyway and were never seen again.

Frank Morris was one of three men who used spoons to dig their way out behind the air grills. They even fashioned dummy heads to leave in their bunks, so the guards thought they were still in their cells, sleeping late...

Eastwood played Morris in Escape from Alcatraz. 

I like to think he made it...

If you ever get the chance, don't miss Alcatraz - there's nothing like it.