Missouri Speleological Survey

Files Report for March and April 2004

Jon Beard sent a report on a cave in Polk County that came from Richard Thompson. It is a natural bridge that is used as a road bridge.

Jon also found a cave that was attempting to be in two counties at the same time with the same location. One got the axe. And Jon sent a few updates and corrections on cave lengths. Later Jon sent a location for a new cave that Carl Wagner has found near Ash Grove. Goes for more than 100ft and is a spring…

Ben Miller has sent in a pile more locations for Stone County. And he pointed out yet another error in the files. Like the Beard “discovery”, here was a cave that was lurking in the files under two different counties.

Via Pam Sales, Andy Free sent records on five new caves in Pulaski County. And he continues to locate more new caves…

Mick Sutton sent nine FileMaker reports on Forest Service caves in Christian County.

Michael Freeman sent more information on a new cave and a better location (much better) for Hamilton Cave, both in Phelps County. And he followed it up with a list of new possible caves, all in Phelps County.

A possible new cave location and other location improvements came from Dave Bixler via Joel Laws.

Michael Carter sent locations on two new caves on USFS land in eastern Christian County. And Michael has sent more data, leads, corrections and correspondence in a variety of communications.

Randy Long sent new reports on two known caves in Oregon County on USFS land.

Al Quamen sent in several corrections of locations and owners’ names in Perry County.

Mike Flannigan sent a location and brief report on a new cave in Dallas County. Now here’s a completely overlooked area. This is the first cave to be recorded on the Charity quad which has lots of river valleys and plenty of good rock. To follow up, Mike has worked over the cave list for Dallas County and returned a file with lots of improvements, corrections, and notes. This will take a while for me to work through as I will now immerse myself into a county I’ve never caved in and try to familiarize myself with the area and what we already know. Good work, Mike.

Conor Watkins sent a cd packed with all kinds of goodies for the files: reports, photos, maps, diagrams. All kinds of stuff is packed into this. Most of this will go into the electronic archives. Thanks Conor!

Lots of people (Flannigan, Laws, Orr, Weaver, Vineyard, et al) commented on Inca Cave (Great Spirit, Maxey) on MoCaves. I added all of this to the reports.

Steve Taylor and Kirsten Alvey of LOG sent in a pile of information that will take some time to go through. They are writing reports, taking photos, and obtaining GPS locations on caves primarily in the Ozark Springs area of Pulaski County. They have apparently found at least five new caves.

Some interesting email discussions between myself, Tom Panion, Tim Harrison and others centered around appropriate cave names. In general, searching for a historical or local name is the best thing to do when discovering new caves. Tom, Tim and others are heading up good work being done on Pioneer Forest lands in Shannon County.

Quad of the Month: the Willhoit 7.5’ in Ozark County features 500ft of carbonate relief, deep hollows and 2 known caves.

Lots of material came in during the MVOR. I’ll cover that in the next report. And I have probably missed some stuff that did come in and I failed to note in this report.

The great loss, of course, was in the untimely death of Ken Thomson. Ken's cave files are voluminous and Matt Forir is working to catalog and preserve those files in a place that will remain accessible to cave researchers.

Scott House

Missouri Cave Database

1606 Luce St.

Cape Girardeau MO 63701

573-651-3782

scott_house@semo.net