|
Suburban Underground Vadders
|
Congress Ave. Tunnels
A friend from my last job, Dropkick, called me up and asked me if I wanted to check out some tunnels near his house. Of course I’ve been dieing to do some exploring in Austin but had been having trouble finding a suitable place to explore so I was all for it. We set out after dark but not really too late. The tunnel can be found under the North side of the Congress Ave. bridge (otherwise known as the “Bat Bridge”) There is a hiking trail that leads right past it by way of a small foot bridge. The entrance was pretty simple although you could easily get wet as it appears that it is almost always flowing. After several hikers passed we hopped over the footbridge and down a stepped stone wall to the entrance. The first 20 feet or so consist of a corrugated metal tube. It looks like a lot of water flows through here because the bottom of this pipe has rusted completely through and the water had eaten right into the concrete leaving about a foot and ˝ wide and ˝ foot deep trench. This tunnel follows Congress Ave and empties into Town Lake.
After navigating that part and avoiding slipping or cutting ourselves on the jagged rusty edges we made it to the solid concrete part of the tunnel. There was a bit of graffiti in this part but the further we went, the less there was. There wasn’t anything really impressive here, just some anti-God/pro-Satan ramblings. Lots of 666s everywhere.
These man-hole covers are spaced out pretty far in this tunnel and none of them had ladders. As we were walking along we started to hear a low rumbling noise further down the tunnel. I wasn’t to sure of what it was because the noise wasn’t quite defined yet. The longer it took to identify the more my pulse raced because my mind was starting to fill with ideas of some flood gate somewhere opening up to let the fury be released. The sound suddenly got much louder and we nearly started running for our lives when the sound became defined and it became apparent that it was just a large truck revving its engine. Before this we had no indication that we were so close to the street above.
Every so often there would be a small tunnel perpendicular to the main tunnel that leads to the right. We decided to follow one to see where it went. Each of these side tunnels went about 15 to what appeared to be an older, smaller tunnel. My guess is that they built the bigger tunnel to assist with the water flow. The side tunnel was much smaller and required you to crouch when the larger one allowed you to stand upright. As you can see in this picture the top half of this tunnel was built with brick making me think it is probably pretty old.
It’s kind of hard to see in this picture, but the bottom of this tunnel was made of concrete. The surprising thing is that this tunnel must have seen a lot of water flow in its time because the water was flowing through a trench at the bottom that ate away about 4 inches of concrete all the way to natural rock and sand below. I wonder where this tunnel empties because there is only one exit under the Bat Bridge and that is for the bigger tunnel.
Another pic of the small, old tunnel shown above. While in this tunnel at one point we could actually hear the noises made by cars stopped at a traffic light. We could hear music playing, engines running and even people talking. I was so tempted to say something but decided not to. I could have probably started a conversation with them if they could hear me as well as I could hear them. We went back to the main tunnel and walked a long way, maybe ˝ mile or more before deciding that we were tired and it was to hot in the tunnel. Along the way we saw only a few interesting landmarks such as pipes running out of one side of the tunnel and into the other. Wouldn’t make any sense but they looked like electrical pipes or possibly sewage. These pipes did not open into the tunnel, they only went from one side to the other. Also there were small 12 inch pipes that we speculated led to curb style storm drains thus, the main purpose of this tunnel.
The breeze was blowing against us on our way out so it was pretty nice. On the way out I took a pic of the Congress Ave. bridge and the hotel on the other side of Town Lake. Maybe Ill go again but there’s no telling how long this tunnel is, there’s still a lot more of Congress Ave. that it could follow.
|
