The VCC Drain is, I believe, one of the first drains in Richmond discovered by Random. It was in December of 2005 that he first showed me his discovery... it's three years later as I write this, and my memory of it has grown a little foggy since then.

After parking my truck in a major shopping area, we crossed heavy traffic and headed down a nearby residential street. After a short ways of trying to act as not-suspicious as possible, we came to a 6-foot-tall brick wall. Somehow (and I'm not sure how) we both managed to pull ourselves up and over it quickly... still trying to not look suspicious! Beyond this wall was a long-abandoned road in the middle of a forest, which Random assured me would lead to our drain entrance.

Sure enough, this road led us to a drain infall... but it was definitely NOT as big as I'd hoped. The tunnel was only tall enough for us to walk through at a low crouch. This seemed to go on forever, but as my back was just beginning to ache, the tunnel got taller, and then opened up into a decent-sized junction room, with round concrete pipes seemingly going off in every direction. As we admired the swarms of black widows in the corners of this room, an almost unbelievable thing happened...

Random's cell phone rang.

So... apparently.... Verizon has some awesome cell phone coverage. We're standing in a tunnel Lord knows how deep underground, and Random is chatting on the phone like it's nothing. I have AT&T (formerly Cingular), and I'm lucky if I have service even when I'm within sight of a cell tower! But I digress...

From this junction room, two 6-7' round concrete pipes headed downstream, and two headed upstream. We headed upstream, as Random assured me that going downstream would have lead us to nothing but deep mud and deeper water. The tunnel we were in went for a fairly long distance, gradually shrinking a little, and transitioning from two pipes to a single round pipe. It eventually made a 90-degree right turn, and then transitioned into a box-section tunnel before ending.

We emerged from the infall, at the edge of a small  pond in the same shopping area where we had started our adventure. Triumphant and full of energy, we tossed our waders into the bed of my truck, hopped in, and headed off to find the Better Up Than Down Drain.

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