Missouri Speleological Survey
Files Report for June-July 2003
Ben Miller sent locations of more new caves in Stone County and Barry County, in the various areas that he has been working. Here’s an example of prime counties that hadn’t had many new caves turned in for some years. But there are caves everywhere that just require finding, as Ben and crew are doing. There should be a large number of additional caves hiding in the areas bordering Arkansas in Taney, Stone, Barry, and McDonald Counties.
A new cave was identified in Ozark County (North Fork River, USFS land) by Mick Sutton, George Bilbrey and myself on a field trip in April. This area represents a geographic challenge with numerous caves in a small area with conflicting locations and synonymous names. By the time the dust had settled we had one new cave (pretty small but interesting) which was previously identified as a synonym for another cave. Is everyone confused? And there’s lots more to do in the area.
Jon Beard sent information and updates on the Garrison Cave #2 length.
Dan Lamping sent information on a possible new cave exposed in a roadcut along Highway “X” in Jefferson County. He is going to investigate further.
Ben McCall sent more information on a potential cave in Greene County. They are hoping to do a dig to gain entry to what they are now calling Stench Pit. (Note to Ben: if you want help digging you need to call it something like “Hurricane Blowing Pit” and don’t mention what the hurricane smells like.)
A beautiful new map came from the Carroll Cave Conservancy via Ron Lather. This is the first of, apparently, many quads to come and is nicely drawn by Tom Lounsbury. This quad shows the area around the new entrance. Quads are a nice approach to cave maps as you can finish a quad even though the entire cave has not been mapped. And with electronic maps you can always go back and add to a quad. Nice work, and it’s good to see quick progress on what is sure to be a monumental effort for many years. And a few days later here came another quad from Tom. Nice work – it’s good to see the cave come alive on paper.
Tom Clifton and Dave Bixler have been working on location revisions on the Meramec State Park quad. Tom sent 32 new locations as a result of their work. This is great stuff and really refines our data a great deal. They also tried to get to a few caves but were not successful in finding them. Generally this can be attributed to a lack of good information, locational or descriptive, on the caves. When good cavers armed with all the tools can’t locate a feature, there’s usually something wrong with our information. This points out the need for more information when writing reports.
Tom and Dave’s work also included a couple of locations which aren’t presently in the files and may be if determined that they are caves. This brings up the natural bridge question: how long of a through trip should a natural bridge be to qualify as a cave? My feeling is that natural bridges should be included in general since they are evidences of former larger caves (perhaps). More importantly, if they are not recorded in the cave database, where will they be recorded? I think outstanding pieces of karst should be included whether they are technically caves or not. But common sense has to be the ultimate judge.
If you remember, a cave report and map on a new cave in McDonald County came courtesy of MoDOT last month. In June we got a better, converted, location for it so that got entered. The process of getting this data all validated takes some time but we have lots of help across the state and this is good data.
George Bilbrey brought a couple of articles from the Salem News, reprints of 1978 articles on Welch Spring. This adds to the growing body of knowledge about this great resource, which goes unnoticed to most visitors to the Ozark Riverways.
Almost the end of July and here comes yet another location in Stone County from Ben Miller. Soon there will be 200 known caves in Stone.
Cave duplication strikes again (there must be a giant speleological Xerox machine out there): while spending a lot of time pouring over Forest Service locations, I “discovered” that Barry County has two, yes two, caves named Twin Caves. On different topos, supposedly, except that one Twin Cave location was not on the topo advertised. When plotted, it was actually on the same topo as the other Twin Cave. Worse yet, it was off of the same ridge as the other one, in a similarly shaped hollow down the same road. Huh, imagine that! Must be why they are both called “Twin”! (Actually the real Twin Cave is cut by the hollow, with a nearly identical cave 40ft across the hollow from it called Bear Waller.) Time to get out the proverbial White-Out and remove a cave, I think.
And Mick Sutton found some notes on a couple of caves he had mapped in Washington County some years ago and have forgotten about. So he’s drawing them up and with a little map reading we determined they are on MDC land in Pea Ridge Conservation Area. And the caves were at about the same location as one of those dratted “Unnamed” caves which had almost no information about it in the files. So now someone needs to go ascertain if Unnamed #2 is really there or if it is just another name for the ones Mick mapped. Washington County has been mostly overlooked for years. There should easily be twice as many caves in that county as we know about.
Quad-of-the-month: The Vanzant quad of Douglas County has lots of soluble rock, some pretty deep valleys, at least one 80ft-deep sinkhole, 17 marked springs, and we have records of not one cave. Go for it.
Scott House
1606 Luce St.
Cape Girardeau MO 63701
573-651-3782