After the tremendous effort of Interhovse, the frosh were understandably
apathetic towards major work projects. This situation was not helped by
being on grades for third term (our class was the first ever with this
problem). To many people, it appeared that the beloved tradition of
Hellride, wherein the frosh barricade themselves in Hell and play Wagner's
Ride of the Valkyries as loudly as possible, would not happen this year.

Actually, a few of the frosh had been thinking about Hellride for weeks,
and we were planning how to actually make it happen. Like every class
before us, we wanted our Hellride to be the best ever, so we tried to
think of every possible upperclassmen method of attack and how we could
prepare for it. We had Mike Davies' account of last year's Hellride on the
web, so we had a baseline to appreciate how much effort it would take to
make a truly impregnable barrier. We also wanted to avoid the mistakes of
last year, namely the situation with Safety and we didn't want to use
concrete walls.

Initially, we had wanted to hold Hellride on Memorial Day weekend, late
Monday night, but it became apparent that this was not a feasible date,
especially when I decided to go to Arizona for the weekend. We pushed back
our tentative date until the next weekend, right before senior finals
week. After Memorial Day, we realized that we would have to hold off until
the following weekend, the one before underclassmen finals. We set a
tentative time of sometime Saturday night.

The first real work on Hellride was started on Friday of the weekend
before the planned date. We got the cart that Greg Steiert made for his
stack, and used it to cart all of the cinder blocks we had left over from
Interhovse into Hell. We decided that my room (room 62) would be a good
place to store them because I had no furniture or anything on the floor.
There were probably around 100 whole cinderblocks left over, and after a
few hours, they were in my room.

Jeremy and I spent the night scouting around campus for useful stuff, and
we got some ideas. Last year, the frosh got a lot of stuff out from the
the Tunnels, but this year it looked like there was little that we could
use. Fortunately, we found two large dumpsters of metal trash on Saturday
night. We spent Saturday and Sunday nights carting away as many of the
*useful* metal objects as we could and piled them on the TFM roof. When we
were done, I counted over forty thick metal pipes that were at least ten
feet long. We also found various other metal junk, which we decided could
be useful.

Monday night Jeremy and I went around campus looking for stuff. People
hadn't thrown away many large metal objects, but in a dumpster outside BI,
we found five pieces of countertop from a chem or bio lab. These were the
heavy black acid-proof, fire-proof countertops that adorn many of the labs
around campus. We obtained these and placed them on the cart. We also got
a few other nice pieces of garbage together that we thought could be
useful.

By now, our initial plan had come together. When we first saw the metal
pipes, Jeremy suggested that we place them in concrete so that we would
have giant contraptions that looked like industrial sea urchins in the
hall. The pipes would be set close enough together so that people could
not get through and would stick out so that the upperclassmen would not be
able to get close enough to be effective with the sledgehammers. We then
found out that Daniell@cco, one of the other Hellfrosh, could use an arc
welder. We decided that metal pipes welded together would form a nice
barricade.

On Wednesday night, we decided to go get a big steel plate that we had
found on the ground outside the 24-hour hardware store. Jeremy had found
it earlier and had his eye on it. He and I went to look at it earlier in
the day to see how heavy it would be. We tried to lift it ourselves, but
the two of us could only budge it, and we are decently strong guys. That
night, we spread the word that we would meet at two in Hell to get enough
manpower together to go get the plate. About a dozen people showed up, and
we took Greg's cart over to the site of the plate. It was so heavy that we
had to use pipes as levers and about eight people on one side of the plate
to lift it onto its side. Eventually, we got the thing onto the cart. We
soon discovered that we couldn't push the cart well at all. Within 20
feet, we heard a whoosh of air and watched the big left tire deflate. Our
plans on moving the plate were put on hold. We then got the idea to get
some big pipes and roll the plate along on the ground, ancient Egyptian
pyramid building style. We put two ropes on it and pulled it on the ground
all the way to the base of the stairs up to Hell in the Ricketts-Fleming
courtyard and left it there after our two hours of work. We wanted to find
a way to get the thing up into Hell, but we figured that we needed a
winch. I found it impressive that at least 15 people showed up over the
course of the night to help. This was the most frosh that I had seen doing
any one thing together all year.

The next day the upperclassmen slowly learned about our efforts of the
previous night. Jeff Miller even estimated the weight of the plate based
on rough dimensions and the density of steel. Our 8 foot x 4 foot x 1 inch
steel plate weighed approximately 1300 pounds! That's 2/3 of a ton.
Anyway, we never moved the plate Thursday because we didn't go over to
P-Plant early enough in the day, so work paused until Friday night.

Friday we obtained a 3/4 ton come-along from P-Plant. After the plate had
reached the top of the stairs, we winched it up on its side and moved it
into the doorway, which is where we quit for the night.

In addition, we rented the arc welder from a rental company on Friday.
They didn't have any brazing rods, so we couldn't use it right away. There
was one frosh who knew how to use an arc welder, daniell@cco. Following
his advice, we went out and bought the necessary brazing rods early
Saturday morning. That turned out to be more of a hassle than we were
anticipating because the first place that we went, and had talked to on
the phone was chained and locked up. The second place was open however,
and we got what we needed. By now, it was nearly noon and people were
starting to wake up after the excitement of the previous night.

Ryan Chornock '99