Steam tunnel

Last week I had the opportunity to tour the steam plant and take a walk through the steam tunnel. It was actually one of the coolest things I've done at Dartmouth. The heat on campus is steam-powered, so next to the Hopkins Center is a plant that churns out a ton of steam - there's a huge smokestack that comes out of the building that's always spewing steam into the air.

To get to the tunnel, our tour guide, who if I recall correctly was the plant manager, opened a hatch in the ground that looked like the entrance to a bomb shelter. So down we went, probably about 10-15 underground. The tunnel runs all the way from the power plant to the Moore Building, and runs right next to the Green and Baker-Berry.

The tunnel was about the size of my dorm hallway (relatively large, I thought) and there were big pipes that carried really hot steam to different buildings. Apparently the tunnel pays for itself because it has made it so much easier to get heating to new buildings on campus.

And we saw a little white mouse right when we got down there and our tour guide speculated it had gotten away from a science building.