The Homeless Tunnel, part 2
Continuing where we left off....
You can get a sense of how large this main hall was from this picture.

Just across from where we came from was a small tunnel in the wall...
...through which Turtle and I squeezed (it was about 20' or so in length) and checked out where it led...
...since it opened out into a manhole... which opened up into a field on the edge of downtown.

No, I have never felt like Bugs Bunny.  Why do you ask?

Of course, since we had more tunnels left to explore below ground, we climbed back and continued where we left off.
At the end of the big hall was a round culvert, but that soon opened back out into yet another section of the "hall."

At the end of it was another series of the walls...
...but this time we were determined to scale them.

I know I pulled a few muscles doing this, but Turtle and I climbed over the sheer walls (I think these were only ~8') and looked around on the other side.
It turned out to be pretty weird, just a huge series of rooms interconnected only by a few holes in the walls.  It was like the world's largest, creepiest racquet ball courts. 

There was no entrance for water except through another large grate above (like the one shown earlier), and the water could only exit though a small metal hatch at the base of one of the walls.
With no running water, there was nothing but a huge echo throughout that reminded me of the atmospheric '80s horror flick "The Keep."

Even stranger was the fact that we ran across footprints in this very out-of-the-way place.  They weren't completely fresh, but they didn't look too old either.
After this last area we also explored a smaller set of 6' culverts (not pictured) that we passed on the way to scaling the wall here.  Unfortunately, that only led us along a busy street, but we never could see out visually or with the GPS since the curbside drains were all about 8' from the bottom of the tunnel.

We eventually made our way back to the smaller pipe to the manhole and climbed out so as to take the less muddy and more direct course back to our starting point, which was about a mile away according to the GPS.

Alexplored 2/20/05.
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