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Black Hearts Drain type: RCP accessed by a series of culverts draining into a swamp. Year: The earliest graffiti in the drain is from the late eighties. Region: Northern Barrie, commercial area. Drain accessibility: The drain can be accessed from a number of manholes in a mall parking lot, but its downstream entrance proper is in the form of a five-foot-high culvert which begins in a swamp and runs some distance in mucky horror. Access isn't strenuous, but it is unpleasant. Drain exitability: We didn't have much trouble popping any of the parking lot manholes from underneath so the drain probably doesn't present much of a problem exit-wise. Traversability: Most of the drain is about five feet high, and must be traversed by hunkering down significantly. We've done that enough by now to know that it gets old fast, but what you can see in the first few chambers is fairly cool. Interesting features: People have been exploring this drain for over a decade! We discovered an untouched "party room" similar to the one at the Happy Hour. We also found more evidence of the mysterious Mouser. Graffiti and relics abound. Hazards: The swamp containing the drain's entrance is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence so don't wear any expensive clothes. It's pretty easy to get filthy in the approach from the swamp, as well, but the drain itself doesn't contain any exceptional hazards we've found. Recommendation: I personally am fascinated by old graffiti and I'm frequently heard to despair about how few Barrie drains actually contain any, so I think this drain stands out among Barrie drains by that virtue alone, if not for the ultra-cool vertical corrugated culvert climb at the swamp. The drain itself is not huge and its architecture is the same old thing, but for what's there, it's pretty nifty. Into The Crypt of the Black Hearts Check out the Black Hearts photo gallery There's a swamp near the Backbone drain, thick with plant life, surrounded by barbed wire and spotted with the carcasses of shopping carts from the mall uphill from it, which had always held an obvious attraction for us. The few forays we'd made into the swamp had uncovered a medium-sized culvert with a high watertable which ran to a large vertical corrugated pipe with a ladder going up the side and a grate ceiling that we could peer down through. From there it connected to a higher pipe. That was all we knew of it for a while, not wanting to brave the high, swampy water to get to the vertical pipe, but a few weeks after discovering the drain Grebin took it upon himself to use several rotting logs and derelict tires from the swamp to set up a crude system of steps through the first culvert stretch. This, in large part, failed, and he got soaked but did make it to the vertical pipe, where he climbed up to the second horizontal culvert and disappeared into it for a few minutes. He came back out shortly afterwards and told us that the culvert was black, drippy and terrifying and that he'd lost his nerve as his batteries started dying a short distance in. Naturally, we decided to return to explore it later, when light sources and free time were in greater abundance. A few weeks later, Static and I returned to the drain and attempted to enter it ourselves. We didn't have any rubber boots but we found it was just barely possible to painfully drain-walk the culvert without getting entirely soaked, and after only a very short eternity of inching down the tunnel with our legs splayed out over several feet of swamp-water we made it to the vertical culvert, climbed it and entered the second horizontal culvert. We didn't know how far it would run but we expected to emerge on the other side of a nearby road. As we ventured further into the pipe with no daylight becoming visible at the end, though, we began to contemplate that it might go somewhere more interesting. The culvert itself wasn't a lot of fun -- the watertable was low but so was the ceiling, from which strange, papery strands hung down en masse. We sometimes had to almost crawl to avoid getting plastered with them. The sides of the culvert were coated with what looked like tar or asphalt and its smell was somewhat overwhelming. It was extremely humid which in combination with the tarry scent made the air somewhat inhospitable, as well as really bad for photography. But we slogged onwards, and eventually our flashlights illuminated a concrete chamber ahead of us, with what appeared to be a pipe running horizontally across its middle. When we reached the concrete chamber we thankfully left the choking tar-air in the culvert behind us. There was still a great deal of humidity coming at us from upstream but on the whole it was much easier to breathe. Given the chance to examine the chamber up close, it became apparent that what we had believed to be a pipe bisecting it was actually a wooden beam, part of several which had been laid out together, side by side, bridging the two raised sides of the manhole chamber. Essentially it was a false floor, three or four feet up. Naturally, we gaped. In the past it was a rare occasion to find any evidence of past visitation in a drain and not once before have we found surviving modifications made to a drain by repeat visitors. This was basically unprecedented. We climbed up onto the floor (gingerly, since it was waterlogged and fairly soft) and examined the confined surroundings. Graffiti covered the walls, referring repeatedly and prominently to the "Black Hearts", whose graffiti we've seen in the Happy Hour drain before. There were also tags from Mouser, an unknown drainer whose tags we've discovered in several drains in the north end of the city. In the drains in which we've found evidence of Mouser, his (or her) tags always went deep into the drain -- far deeper than your average bored teenager would care to venture -- indicating he was a fairly committed drainer. We've been interested in finding out whether or not Mouser is still active since we first noticed the tags in another small drain over a year ago. The graffiti in this drain was dated from 1987 to 1990, which was interesting because it meant not only that the people who'd been hanging out here had been doing so more than a decade ago, but also that they (or someone else) had continued to do so for a few years. This was the first evidence we'd ever found of a (if I may use the term) Drainer Scene ever having existed in Barrie. At any rate, given the dates on the walls it seems unlikely that Mouser is still active in Barrie but we still aren't sure either way. The feeling that I was overcome with upon finding this chamber with its false floor, complete with bits of carpet laid across it and the abundance of graffiti adorning the walls, was one of archaeological discovery -- we'd found an untouched, preserved structure, made by persons unknown, from years in the past, in the last place we expected to find anything. It was as if we'd cracked open some ancient tomb and were the first people in ages to be privy to its secrets. Eventually I got over my historical semi-panic and once Static and I had photographed the modified chamber extensively, we made our way further up the drain. It was pretty standard fare for a municipal RCP, although with less airflow than most, and not exceptionally large by any means so by the third or fourth chamber we were starting to agonize about the slouching, wide-legged drainwalk the watertable occasionally mandated and decided to escape through a manhole and tell Asher of our discovery. We came back with her that night and we all dropped through a manhole above the Black Hearts' false-floored chamber rather than going through the unpleasant culverts again. When we popped the manhole lid, the new perspective on the chamber caused us to notice notice something that we hadn't before -- the single biggest drain tag we've seen yet, the word "Mouser" written in three-foot-high letters vertically down the height of the chamber. Neat. Asher accompanied us upstream a ways and eventually we popped a manhole and crawled up out of the ground just outside of a restaurant. A guy in a van pulled up next to the open manhole just as Asher and Static had escaped and asked them whether or not they had "found anything down there". They said we hadn't. I pulled myself out of the manhole, Static kicked the lid back into its collar and we fled. Do be sure to check out the Black Hearts photo gallery. Yay! -Flame0ut Contact: [email protected] .