Out of the blue, one day I got an e-mail from DrainDog, inquiring about local drains and mentioning one that he'd found. Intrigued, I asked him to show me this new drain.

The entrance is through the outfall, which is a pair of parallel pipes - the left one being a 6' round steel pipe, and the right one 7' round corrugated steel with a concrete floor. We took the right tunnel first - it runs straight for a very short distance, and then we had to climb up a set of rungs to emerge topside through the drain of a small pond (kinda scary, but less dangerous than it sounds). We returned to the outfall, and ventured up the left tunnel...

The left tunnel is where all the fun is at. After a short section of steel pipe, it turns left at a small waterfall, and changes to 6' round concrete pipe. it soon makes a 90-degree right turn and runs more-or-less straight for the remainder. About halfway to the end, there's an almost-respectable waterfall that's a little tricky to navigate without slipping or getting wet. At the end of the tunnel there's a small room with another waterfall, about 5' high. Here the tunnel gets smaller, and has a series of left and right turns. DrainDog and I worked our way through these turns (and another small waterfall), finally coming to a neat little dry chamber beneath a grate-style manhole that let a lot of light into the tunnel. Not realizing where this manhole was, we popped it and climbed out... only to find ourselves emerging RIGHT next to a major intersection on Jefferson Park Avenue. I can only imaging what the drivers in the cars stopped at the intersection were thinking.

After emerging through the manhole, we retraced out route above-ground, and utilized the right half of the drain as shortcut back to where we started (climbing down the pond drain, and exiting through the outfall), hence the name "Shortcut drain".

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