Desperately Seeking Rooftop View

Ryan Kailath lives far from his beloved mountains of Northern California. Yet, he still finds a way to be on top of the world.

Photo courtesy Ryan Kailath

More than eight million people, eight-and-a-half billion square feet. Suffice to say, New Yorkers have a love-hate relationship with space, all the more reason for us to occasionally get away from it all. But finding sanctuary in the city is not as hard as you might think. In "My Secret New York Sanctuary," a new series by Narratively and WNYC, we get up close and personal with New Yorkers who use a little ingenuity to find solitude in some unlikely places.

Ryan Kailath missed the mountains of Northern California. He missed scrambling up cliff faces and trekking down steep ravines. He missed nature, and that sense of awe, spirituality and solitude it provided him. So he recreated the feeling smack in the heart of New York City.

"I try to get on the roof of any building that I'm in," says Kailath, 31, who moved to New York in 2007 and estimates that he has since sneaked onto the tops of at least fifty NYC buildings.