The Big Door Tunnel
This was a tunnel I had scouted out maybe a year earlier with Dani, but I didn't have a flashlight with me at the time.  Believe it or not, I actually made it pretty far just feeling my way and sliding my feet along the floor to feel for obstructions or holes.  There was light up ahead from a shaft through the levee, and that guided me.  Melancholy and I hit this one and checked it out to see what was beyond that point.
Here's the "big door," obviously.  I won't go into a physics lesson here, but the counter-intuitive property of these hatches is that the taller they are, the easier they are to open.
This is what it looks like inside.
That's actually the moon visible through the grate at the top of the shaft.  These run through the levee and the metal doors (like the one on the left of the frame) seal off the tunnel when the river is high to prevent a backflow into the city.
Beyond that point things got lower...
...and then really low.  While it was possible to go past this point, it would have involved getting really wet.  This is a frustrating scenario for me: A tunnel that may or may not continue and perhaps widen out, but I have to turn back and get a raft in order to find the answer which may turn out to be simply, "No, it's a dead end."  We still haven't been back.
Alexplored 2/5/06.
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