26 OregonStater.org MURAL: BLAKE BROWN C U LT UR E stubbornly holding fast and, bit by bit, growing more elaborate. A year ago, though, sophomore Cassidy Vafi knew none of this. A mere six inches beneath the sidewalk bordering Jefferson Way, she and some two dozen students in senior instructor Anna Fidler’s 2D Core Studio art class filed down the dim, humid tunnels, their path illuminated by flashlight and iPhone.At the head of the pack was Les Walton, Oregon State’s energy operations manager, who was leading the tour through this subterranean warren below campus. They were so close to the surface that they still had cell service, and yet it was as though they had entered a different world. They passed through a corridor where the relatively cooler temperatures produced shimmering pearls of condensation on the ceiling. “It felt like a really big adventure,”Vafi says. They resurfaced, elated, about a mile from where they’d started. Vafi got curious: “I know that they’re there for a practical reason, but they seem so mysterious,” she says. “I was curious if there were any crazy stories.” Officially, the job of the steam tunnels — which extend roughly two and a half miles around campus and are as old, in parts, as the university campus itself — is to deliver heat to residence hall radiators, athletics complex pools, laundry rooms, research labs and greenhouses. Inside the tunnels, 18-inch pipes clad in wool insulation carry supersat- ↑ FROM LEFT: Descending to passages below. TOP: Students paint a mural in the tunnel entrance behind the Energy Center. BOTTOM: Decades of student graffiti marks the walls. continued
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