COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The answer to the question you’ll soon be asking is: a Gatorade bottle.
Bill Hendrix hauls the bottle with him, along with his lunch, on his climb to work every day.
Yes, climb. Hendrix, an employee of GE Johnson Construction Co., operates the red crane atop the building in downtown Colorado Springs that’s being transformed into a new home for the U.S. Olympic Committee. To get to work, Hendrix must climb a ladder from the basement all the way to the cab of the crane about 50 feet above the roof of the six-story building—a climb of 175 feet.
Once he’s up there, he’s there for the day. And it’s a long day, starting in darkness at 5:30 a.m. and often not ending for 12 hours or more.
“Sometimes it’s been 9:30 at night,” Hendrix says. “They just tell me when to be here, and they tell me when to leave.”
Which leads to that Gatorade bottle. As he apparently does not have the largest bladder known to man, he uses the bottle for obvious purposes.
“You do your other business at about 4:30 in the morning,” Hendrix says. “You’ve got to become pretty regular.”
The climb each morning takes him five to seven minutes, including a couple of breaks to catch his breath. The dizzying heights at the top, he says, don’t bother him.
“If this thing’s going to fall over, it’s going to kill me anyway, so don’t be scared.”
Mother Nature can add to the excitement. When winds reach a consistent speed of 32 mph, the crane work is put on hold, but Hendrix typically will remain in the cab and wait for the winds to die down.
“I’ve been up here in 70 miles an hour wind sometimes,” he says. “It gives you quite a ride.”
There’s not much room to move around in the cab, though it is tall enough for Hendrix to stand up and stretch. He has a radio to listen to and a spectacular view to enjoy, but there’s not a lot of down time, he says. “Normally, there’s something on my hook all day long.”
Not that’s he’s complaining.
“It’s a whole lot of fun. I love my job. It’s one of those jobs where you like to wake up and go to every day.”
It’s a lucrative job, too. Hendrix said he makes “well into the six figures. But that’s a lot of hours, that’s 60, 70 hours a week it takes to make that.”
His duties atop the USOC building are winding down; the crane is scheduled to come down March 20. After that, Hendrix, 51,—who has been in the crane business for close to 30 years—will head off to a construction project in Parker.
“I don’t care what I do,” he said. “Just keep me busy.”
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