The New York Times and NPR’s “All Things Considered” got cozy on Sunday with his ‘n’ her pieces on “the City’s Subterranean Wilderness.”

Times reporter Alan Feuer’s lede:

IT must have been the third or fourth day — time, by that point, had started to dissolve — when I stood in camping gear on Fifth Avenue, waiting as my companions went to purchase waterproof waders at the Orvis store. We had already hiked through sewers in the Bronx, slept in a basement boiler room, passed a dusty evening in a train tunnel; we were soiled and sleep-deprived, and we smelled of rotting socks. Yet no one on that sidewalk seemed to notice. As I stood among the businessmen and fashionable women, it dawned on me that New Yorkers — an ostensibly perceptive lot — sometimes see only what’s directly in front of their eyes.

I suppose that’s not a bad way to think about the urban expedition we were on: a taxing, baffling, five-day journey into New York’s underground, the purpose of which, its planners said, was to expose the city’s skeleton, to render visible its invisible marvels. The trip’s conceiver, Erling Kagge, a 47-year-old Norwegian adventurer, had ascended Mount Everest and trekked on foot to both the North and South poles. His partner, Steve Duncan, a 32-year-old student of public history, had logged more than a decade exploring subways, sewers and storm drains. Last month, the two of them forged a new frontier: an extended exploration of the subterranean city, during which they lived inside the subsurface infrastructure, sleeping on the trail, as it were.

Feuer tagged along, as did NPR’s Jacki Lyden:

Next morning — or evening — Jacki Lyden, the NPR correspondent who has joined us for this leg of the journey, offers me a cough drop. I offer bourbon from a plastic bottle. Underground, we share the day’s first meal: two Halls, two sips of whiskey.

From Lyden’s 18 minute ATC megapiece:

We waited in the snow as the explorers descended below, along with a videographer and a New York Times reporter. The men climbed over a wall and lowered themselves into a freezing stream flowing into a culvert. They vanished. They would have to walk 30 or 40 blocks, with their waders on, to a climb out of the previously scouted manhole on the residential street in the Bronx where we would be waiting.

Both reports are well worth, well, digging into.