After our first attempt to cross under the highway of regret failed due to a lack of a decent airflow, I decided to try again, with only Axel Rose, as opposed to around four other people.
The drain, which starts near Schlotzky’s sub shop, is about 1m at its entrance, but reaches a small closed up gutterbox after about 20m. The transition from the first pipe, a spiral drain, tot he gutterbox, is actually slightly dangerous, because part of the metal of the drain tore and is twisted down from the roof.
The gutterbox probably used to have a grate over it, but whenever they last widened the highway, they had to cover it over with something, and they chose a conveniently located orange sign that reads, "construction."
From that junction, there are two upstream drains, on, about .5m in diameter, the other, about .375m. We opted for the larger, and crawled for a while, eventually hitting a curve. After coming around the cure, I, who was on point, saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
"Hey guys, either this drain gets very small, or goes really far."
This, in and of itself, was not a problem for me, however our larger drainers were already having movement issues. Also, there appeared to be a large pipe that blocked progression through the drain about 5m ahead silhouetted against the distant exit point. I was tempted to keep going to check out the obstacle, but then I noticed that the air was beginning to feel warm and stale. I told everyone that we’d be backing out, and the extraction passed smoothly, without anyone getting horribly injured on the hanging shard of drain near the gutterbox even.
Afterwards, we scouted around to find possible places that the drain could exit, but none of them seemed to fit my memory, and and many questions remained.
Saturday, Axel Rose and I dropped into the drain near Schlotzky’s and moved without problem to the sign-covered gutterbox. He still had a race later on that day, so he remained there for comm reasons as I progressed through the second leg of the drain on my own. After coming around the curve, which was probably a forty-five degree angle, and not as small as I had thought, I saw the light again. I kept moving to where the pipe seemed to bar my path, but found it, in actuality, to be a mere board that had lodged itself perfectly to seem as a pipe from a distance. I maintained communication with Axel Rose concerning the air quality and my discoveries, and headed onward. Soon, I found a smaller drain that emptied into my present one, but probably wouldn’t be man-accessible without a skateboard.
I kept pulling myself along, varying my movement techniques to keep myself from growing fatigued, and occasionally breaking and lying flat to allow fresh air to flow over me, albeit slowly. Moving forward, I found a piece of flat metal, apparently a sign. I flipped on my white light (I had been using red LED’s for night vision reasons), and found that it read: "No trespassing." I laughed, and told Axel Rose, who was now about 30m away at least. The sign must have washed down the drain, because there was no way the powers the be could have expected someone to heed a sign they had already traveled underground around 40 to 60 meters to read. I carried it with me for a while, then deposited it in the next gutterbox I hit, which was also covered, but this time with a concrete slab, and not a sign. Hopefully future drainers will see it, and laugh.
I took a short break in the small room (which couldn’t have been larger than a Rubbermaid 20 gallon container), and moved on, hitting another gutterbox, this time, sunlit, and I could see that the exit was only another 3m away or so. Unfortunately, there was a large amount of rocks and glass and mud in my way. I told Axel to go ahead and exit, and I did the same.