Missouri Speleological Survey

 

Files Report for October – December 2010

 

Very nice new maps of Rough Hollow Cavelet and Lewis Ford Cave, both in the Ozark Riverways came from Ed Klausner. Ed is a CRF board member from Iowa who attended the October expedition.

 

Mike Tennant sent in some new or improved locations of caves in the Riverways areas. He followed this up with a new map of Fire Hydrant Stream Cave and a map of Cedargrove Bluff Cave. Mike also sent the final draft map of a cave in St. Charles County.

 

Roy Gold sent in an improved location for a cave in Benton County. He also noted a cluster of bats, which prompted his exit. Roy sent information on a cave in Christian County. Roy followed this up with a tidy package for a new cave in McDonald County. Including was a Topo file, entrance photo, copies of a newspaper article, and a report by Jon Beard. Also included was an improved location for a nearby known cave.

 

Paul Hauck sent photographs and locations for two new pits in Perry County. Both have now been mapped.

 

Edmund Tucker sent a cave location, photos and a description of a cave in Perry County thought to be new. Turned out (due to location difficulties) to already be known and mapped, some years ago. Paul Hauck sent along a draft map of the cave. This not-unusual-situation points out the rationale for having multiple locational methods for comparison. And nothing is better than a good set of written directions, relative to some known point. So it was not a waste of time but rather an opportunity; I sat down and worked over the information extensively. I ended up removing two other cave records which turned out to be duplicates. And then Paul Hauck, Richard Young, and I followed up with a field trip to the area. We obtained GPS readings and photographs of all the known entrances on the property and added a couple of new ones (to replace the removed ones, eh?)

 

Also, Richard loaned us his beautiful 140 slide (real emulsion slides – remember) show on Crevice Cave. Patti and I have now digitized all of these slides to add to the digital files.

 

Randy Long sent a biological report on Banker Cave. Randy also sent a new GPS location for a cave in Shannon County and a status report on another FS cave in Douglas County.

 

Kris Hartman sent a new length for Blackfathom River Cave in Sainte Genevieve County; the cave has now been mapped to 6.48 miles. Kris also included line plots and topographic overlays of the cave.

 

New reports came from Jim Cooley on two USFS caves in Barry County. Jim is monitoring FS caves as part of the CRF monitoring program. Jim also turned in a report and location and entrance photo of a new cave on USFS land in Oregon County plus full reports and entrance photographs of three new caves on Ozark Riverways land. Jim also sent maps of a new cave in Oregon County – one in color, one in black and white and one with a biological layer on it. He followed this up with a report on a new FS cave in Oregon County and two nice maps of caves in the Ozark Riverways that he found and mapped during the October CRF expedition.

 

Chad McCain has been busily fixing cave locations in Perry and Ste. Genevieve Counties. He unloaded about 15 emails worth of improved locations, landowners’ names, directions, corrections, and google-earth location maps. This also included several new caves in Ste Gen, ones I had missed back around 1980 (I guess). Nice work Chad! Okay, time for Scott’s Soapbox: lots of people ask how they can help improve the data sets. Here is yet another example of how one individual goes out and does just that. No drama, no whining, just good data produced with some good effort.

 

Eric Hertzler turned in a new cave on national forest land in CHR. This was part of CRF-sponsored work by SPG. And Eric sent in a pile of locations and other information on a number of caves in Camden County that he and Gary Johnson found earlier in 2010. Eric also sent a name correction from Christian County. Lastly, Eric followed up with maps of three caves (including the new one above) plus very nice descriptions of them, written by Eric, Charity, and Jon Beard. The descriptions are so important to the MSS; wish that more people would do them. Good work Eric, etal!

 

Mick Sutton sent a location and entrance description of a new cave in Reynolds County. Mick also sent a pile of revisions, descriptions, and biological reports for caves, mostly on Forest Service land.

 

Gary and Alberta Zumwalt sent new GPS locations for two caves in Morgan County. Most of Morgan County needs this, and the LOG folks are going after it…

 

Stan Sides had dropped off a pile of Perry County data a few months ago. Wife Patti entered all the survey data from Ted Ballman Cave (2600ft) and Dorothy Taylor Cave (5600 ft) into the WALLS program. With Stan’s help we were able to clear up a few questions. Now a good data set exists for these two important caves, all part of the headwaters area of the Moore Cave System. After getting this material into a GIS system, we hope to get a new map going of Taylor. Stan also dropped off various other journals and other data which we will be plugging into the database as time allows.

 

Jon Beard sent a digital copy of his Garrison Cave #2 map. This is the original Adobe Illustrator file, which will be kept with other archived digital material. It is always a good idea to have backups of the original native files, just in case someone wants to use them in the future. Jon and Eric Hertzler sent various other corrections and discussions on missing caves into the files.

 

And the end of the year brought another newsy email from Jon with more mysteries from the annals of Greene County caves. This will take some time to figure out...

 

Keep it coming, folks!

 

 

Scott House

Missouri Cave Database

1606 Luce St .

Cape Girardeau MO 63701

573-651-3782

scott_house@semo.net