So I found myself standing at the bottom of the boom of a BIG dragline crane yesterday. While a piece of equipment on board was being serviced, the gentleman up those steps is inspecting specific sections on the boom. This is a regular safety procedure, and I guess he figured this would also be a good use of the momentary downtime. I was *almost* crazy enough to say I’d follow him. The problem with those grated steps isn’t going up them, it’s coming down. They’re hard to see if you’re not used to them, and it’s hard not to focus on the ground below. And this picture may not convey it, but that is a very steep upward angle. Yikes!

See how steep that is? And it’s enormous, too. The house of the crane itself is about three or four times the size of my house. It certainly dwarfs the Suburbans parked on either side, doesn’t it? I also took some shots from the top of the back end of the housing, but pictures just do NOT do justice to the scale of this thing. And it isn’t even the biggest one in the state, to my knowledge.