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Here's Phil near the entrance I exited from once, entered from last time I came back, and where we entered again this time. |
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Artwork by Soler (who dated the work 1986.
Yeah, right. More like 2006).
First thing Phil and I did was head upstream and continue the journey... |
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Metal bits always collect in shallow pits like this one... |
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Here's what we found in it: an industrial blade, padlock, drain cover, and lots more junk. |
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A curbside drain up above us, but too high to reach and stick the GPS out of. |
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A relatively small side tunnel. Phil checked it out, but it just seemed to go on forever, so we stuck to the main tunnel and continued upstream. |
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It kept getting smaller up ahead. Beyond this point it stepped up several inches. Phil went ahead and scouted it while I got a GPS reading from a curbside drain accessible through a nearby side tunnel. Unfortunately, he left his camera where we parted ways, so he could move faster. As a result, we didn't get any pictures of the very end, but it wasn't very much farther than I left off last time. Total distance from the outfall at the river (estimated from connect-the-dots sums between multiple GPS readings): a little under six miles. |
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Next we reversed course and headed downstream
since Phil had never been in this system at all before.
You know what else was heading downstream? Some sewage. This is a bit running into the main tunnel. The white stuff is dissolved toilet paper. |
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This is where it was leaking from, that joint in the foreground. There's no frame of reference, but this pipe is under 18" in diameter, so it wasn't a lot, fortunately. However, overall this system has more leaks in it than any other I've encountered. |
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This is a leak of a different kind: Pure water. It isn't clear here (and I didn't want to risk getting the camera wet attempting a profile shot), but water is gurgling up through a crack in the bottom of the tunnel. I run across this periodically (as you might have seen elsewhere on the site), but I still don't know if it's groundwater or from a leaking water main. |
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All tunnels have shovels. I would put money on this. |
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Phil spotted a small side tunnel I hadn't noticed previously that opened out into this moderately-sized section. It was warmer in here than in the main tunnel, so the lens fogged over. |
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Little roots were growing though (or from?) the ceiling here. |
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Continue to Part II |