Before urban exploration became drone footage, YouTube thumbnails and the word “urbex,” Action Squad was publishing mission reports from places underneath and behind the Twin Cities.
Visit Action Squad’s underground archive
The site documents explorations around Minneapolis and Saint Paul: tunnels, abandoned industrial spaces, mines, utility infrastructure, forgotten institutional buildings and other places designed specifically to keep ordinary people out.
Contemporary descriptions of the group call it an old-school urban-exploration crew, and later explorers still cite the site as an influence. That makes the archive useful twice over: it documents physical places, but it also documents the early culture of internet-era urban exploration.
Mission reports instead of content
Action Squad’s pages came from a period when an expedition often ended as a hand-built web page containing photographs, captions and a story.
There was no requirement to turn every trip into a recurring channel format.
That matters because old exploration sites often preserve details that newer summaries flatten: entrances that have since been sealed, buildings that were demolished, tunnel routes that changed, graffiti from a particular period, and firsthand descriptions of spaces before redevelopment.
The legal and safety problems are obvious. Underground infrastructure, abandoned buildings and restricted facilities can be genuinely dangerous, and the fact that someone entered a place years ago does not make it accessible or safe now.
As history, though, the archive is unusually specific.
A 2015 CBS Minnesota feature about a younger urban explorer pointed readers back to Action Squad’s reports on old mines, munitions plants and monasteries. By then the site itself had already become part of the local exploration canon.
This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
Cities constantly bury, seal, demolish and repurpose themselves. Action Squad caught pieces of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in the interval before that happened.