Personal: Laurie Anderson, Bill Hoffmann, Rob Jackson, Esteban Jobaggy, Lisa Moore, Will Pockman, Susan Rainey. Terry Holsinger Dale Barnard Anne Ladner, Anika Addison, Aaron Addison, Chris Gilbert, Jim Kennedy Randy Brown, Morgan Carnes, Butch Fralia, Benjamin Heuss, Keith Heuss, Sharon Mastbrook, Ed Goff, John, Jennifer, Jessie, Brandon Gail, Tony Sultana, Dennis Durt, Marcus Barksdale, Wayne Pelinski, Robby Hargiss, Oscar Berrones, and Lucile Pide Berrones

Team one saw Terry Holsinger and Dale Barnard returning to the Lost Petzl System to complete the overland survey. They picked up additional crew at SAB283 because two of the four cavers had shied away from the tight descent, eliminating the possibility of surveying it. With Anne Ladner, Anika Addison, Aaron Addison, and Chris Gilbert, we surveyed between SAB283, SABK006 (The Grapevine Feature in The Korner Karst), SAB218 (Arizona Cave), SABK007, and SAB281 (Floorless Crevice/BAC). They also tagged a karst feature as SABK012 that lies in the railroad bed about 100 meters from the road/trail in Lively Pasture. The feature is marked with a rock cairn. It needs to have loose dirt and rocks pulled out to see if it can be entered.
Total hours: 21

Team two was Ed Goff, Wayne Pelinski, Robby Hargiss, Oscar Berrones, and Lucile Pide Berrones returned to Chimneyers Delight to continue the survey. They got about 25 m of survey in Chimneyers Delight, which was 5 rooms at the end (?) of the downstream, beyond a very tight squeeze. Left to do is to link up to the existing survey and mop up the rest; there's quite a bit more passage, some mazy stuff, another chimney that connects to the upper level, and a few leads. At this rate Ed Goff thinks he will be in there for another year. As Ed puts it" Drafting in the cave with plan, profile, and cross-sections all at once is so slow that everyone else gets bored and loses interest. Most people are there to play anyway. I need to go in and just shoot all the stations in one day, then the next month spend the weekend in there by myself drawing. I might be able to finish in two more trips that way, if the cave doesn't get any bigger". There's passage on the upper level that I haven't even started on. Another team surveyed through there yesterday (they tied in to my station 4). I have a lot of effort invested in this, and I’d like a chance to do a complete map.

Team Hours: 25.

Team Three, reported by: Jim Kennedy and included team member: Randy Brown
"This trip was one of the most significant in recent years at CBSP. Although fairly short, Kennedy and Brown succeeded in connecting Cave of Many Names to Chimneyers Delight to form the Lost Petzl Cave System. At the same time, another team was surveying Last Gasp Cave (discovered and explored by Brown and Kennedy on the March trip. Cave of Many Names had four entrances, the Lemons Pit entrance, the Fissure entrance, the Kennedy/Vreeland entrance, and the Big Room entrance. The Chimneyers Delight Entrance is a long fissure with some small, impassable openings nearby. It is possible that a little digging could turn several of these into new entrances. Last Gasp has two entrances, the Brown entrance and the Danger entrance. That makes at least seven distinct entrances for the System. If we can connect in Golden State Motor Oil Can Cave, it would add three more. The Lost Petzl Cave System is rapidly becoming one of the more significant caves in the Park.
Jim and Randy left camp around 10:30 armed with 30-plus pounds of digging and caving gear. An interesting hike from the Lively Pasture parking area soon brought them to their objective: Cave of Many Names. They rigged a rope into the Big Room entrance and lowered the gear. Unencumbered, they climbed into the Lemons Pit entrance and made it to the dig site in 15 minutes. The dig is the scene of a lot of work by Randy, Jim, and Russ Johnson in March, and by Russ and Curtis Vaughn last month. Several large wall protuberances remained, blocking access to breezy crawlway seen beyond. Eric Flint was able to dig nearly to this point from the Chimneyers Delight section last month, but only an indirect light and voice contact were made. In approximately 1.5 hours, Jim and Randy were through, and made the historic first trip through the "Wretched Connection", named for the 100' of bellycrawl, have of that over rimstone. They made contact with the Chimneyers Delight mapping team, telling them they could now survey the connection. They then freeclimbed out the Chimneyers Delight entrance. Randy reentered the Many Names section to retrieve the gear, which Jim hauled out. The cave was derigged and the boys were back in camp by 3:30.
An attempted trip to Close Shave Cave for more digging ended soon, thankfully for a dip in Spicewood Spring and a game of golf. But that's another story."
Total man-hours: 10

Team four was made up of a UT Botany Professor and some grad students. They have been working in a number of other caves around the state and were assessing the usability of the caves at CBSP for their Project. As their findings were positive we will have them obtain a collection permit through "Austin" before procedding with any collections.
Team ROOT was: Laurie Anderson, Bill Hoffmann, Rob Jackson, Esteban Jobaggy, Lisa Moore, Will Pockman, Susan Rainey.

We assessed the feasibility of using caves at Colorado Bend State Park to study root systems. We first entered Sweet and Sour Caves (everyone entered Sweet Cave: Hoffmann and Jobbaggy entered Sour Cave). Roots were seen on the floor of both caves between approximately 20 and 40 ft depth. Trees in the area included species in the genera Quercus, Ulmus, and Juniperus.
We then examined three caves - Floorless Fissure, Cave of Many Names, and Mystery Hole. Pockman and Jobbaggy climbed the 70 ft or so to the bottom of Floorless Fissure but found no real cave. Hoffmann and Anderson observed a few roots in Cave of Many Names (30-35 ft.) but also did not find the actual cave (there is one in this case). Rainey, Moore, and Jackson sampled Mystery Cave adjacent to an approximately 12' bluff. There was a crawl down, a fairly large walking area, and then a much tighter crawl where the air was passable, but stuffy. Large and small roots were observed with a thick pink band on the large roots (approximately 7 m deep). On surface examination they were almost certainly cedar elm (there was a large tree nearby). There were also cedars around but the morphology was quite distinct including "lenticels" perpendicular to the root axes.
They also GPS the entrances for the caves they visited, for there own references as well as adding to the average GPS for the caves

Total person hours: 56.

Team Five was Tony Sultana, Dennis Durt, and Marcus Barksdale who returned to the Last Gasp entrance to the Lost Petzl System to survey the connection with Chimneyers Delight. They connected their survey in to Ed’s station four. This connection was explored during the April trip.

Team Hours: 18.0

Team Six was John, Jennifer, Jessie, Morgan, and Brandon Gail. This team headed over to Ice Box to start the survey, planning on being stopped by Bad Air. While there they also surveyed the small cave just past Ice Box, SABxxx?. They were able to finish the smaller cave and set 11 stations in Ice Box. The Ice Box Survey will need to be finished as there are still going leads in it.

Team Hours: 27.5

Team Seven reported by:Keith Heuss
Team Seven was Morgan Carnes, Butch Fralia, Benjamin Heuss, Keith Heuss, Sharon Mastbrook
Butch, Keith, Ben, Sharon and Morgan left camp at 10:00 to do more GPS work. All of the GPS work was done with both mine and Butch’s Garmin units with a 10 minute average than we took our two readings and averaged them together. Our first stop was the caves near the red gate. We couldn’t make it to the gate because a tree had fallen across the road, so we parked before the gate. We went to the North of the fence to look for a cave we hadn’t been to in a long time. Butch walked straight to it like he knew where it was. We noticed a tag on a tree near the cave. It was the missing SAB 245 which has been listed as "we don’t know where this cave is" for several years. Well we did our GPS work at the cave. Next we went to SAB 234, Red Gate Cave, then SAB 235, Caves R Us, then SAB 236, Extraction Pit. Next we did GPS on the Upper Gold Mine than SAB 207 which is an unnamed cave near the Upper Gold Mine. It was getting late by now so we returned to camp for lunch. It was 1:00 PM when we got back to camp. After lunch Butch, Ben and I returned to the same area and tried to find Sweet and Sour Caves. After our first attempt, we returned to the parking lot for Turtle Shell Cave and took off walking to the caves. We found a small near cave and did GPS on it, than we found what we thought to be a new cave. We later talked to Terry and we decided it was Bitter, which does not meet the qualifications of being a cave. We found Sweet Cave after that and did our GPS readings. It was getting near closing time for the river office and I needed to get the key to the Conference Center so we headed out. After our visit at the river office, we stopped at the Gorman Cave parking lot and headed to Polish Cave. We did our GPS there and we went to Crystal, which has been listed as a cave but does not meet the length requirements as a cave. It was getting towards 6:00 PM so we headed back to the campground. Since this is the last official trip for the caving season, Butch did his community feed. This has been a tradition for several years now for the final trip. Butch had gotten some hamburgers to cook up. Butch and Sharon started cooking around 7:00 and continued until around 9:00. This gives them two volunteer hours in addition to the days work. This is sort of a volunteer appreciation affair for all of the volunteers which have worked on the project. Sunday, Butch, Ben and I walked from camp to SAB 184, Blue Ribbon Fissure. While there, we saw a Harvestman above the entrance in the process of molting. I took several close up pictures of it while Butch did the GPS. Next we headed over to the Conference Center. I was looking for a chart which had the names of the volunteers that had lead Gorman Cave tours during the Earth Day project. It was not there. I asked Ed to look for it. We did a GPS on SAB 55, Gorman Falls Cave. We also got a reading of a crevice near the cave. This is rumored to connect into Gorman Falls Cave so we list it as Back Entrance. The GPS readings are listed below. The difference between Butch’s and my GPS were unusually low this weekend. This raises our contingency level of our readings a lot.
 

Total work hours is 34 for the weekend.

The last report for the April 10-12, 1998 trip reported by: Keith Heuss & Butch Fralia

Personnel: Morgan Carnes, Butch Fralia, Benjamin Heuss, Christopher Heuss, Keith Heuss, Dawn Hill, Alvis Hill, Ken Langly, Cheri Lightfoot, Sharon Mastbrook, Tammy Wharton
Saturday morning, Keith, Ben, Chris, Alvis, Dawn, Ken, Cheri and Tammy started the day by going to the Gorman Falls area of the park to do some preparation for the coming up Earth Day event. We first started by hiking the trail to Gorman Cave trail. We did some clearing of the trail. There were several places where the Colorado River floods have deposited debris on the trail. We removed most of the debris and leveled out the trail. We also took some entrance pictures of Gorman Cave. After that, we hiked down to the falls so Ken could pick out his place he would set up to take the tickets for the falls. We also took some pictures of the falls. When we finished, it was past time for lunch so we headed back to the campground. We had spend four hours at this project. The afternoon Dawn, Alvis, Cheri, Keith, Chris and Tammy went to Turtle Shell Cave to take some pictures. We staged some surveying pictures to show at the Earth Day event. We got some shots of sketching, reading compass and pulling tape. We noted at least three small Pipistril bats hanging from the ceiling. Alvis and Dawn had to leave at 4:30 to pick up their foster kid. We did a time check and someone said it was already 4:20 so we hurriedly exited the cave and headed back to camp. We were in the cave about 1½ hours. We put in a total of 41 man-hours for the day. Saturday morning, Butch, Sharon and Morgan left camp about 10:00 AM and drove to Lively Pasture. They took up from the area of Space Heater Cave where GPS measurements were started on the March Trip. That was the trip where a military GPS was available for testing and taking measurements. On the March trip, the military GPS was used to record the location of Sore Toe Cave (SAB179). Butch’s Garmin GPS was also used in the averaging mode (10 minute average) to develop a comparative reading. The original overland survey UTM location was programmed into Butch’s GPS. Noting on the Garmin moving map display that the measurement from last month and the overland survey location were significantly different, they headed to the overland location for SAB179 - and found Varmint Trap Cave (SAB178)! OOPS! This could either have been an error in Butch’s UTM location calculations from Keith’s map or an error in the old overland survey data. At this point, it’s not important, only that the data is corrected. Continuing on, they went to the expected UTM location of SAB178 and found Cow Bone Cave (SAB202). They moved on and located Crippled Deer Cave (SAB201), then Don’t Fit Pit (SAB199), and an unnamed cave (SAB200). GPS measurements were taken at each location, averaging the readings for 10 minutes at each cave. The above activity took them well into the afternoon when they returned to camp for lunch. After Lunch, they went off to find Lemon’s Coon Cave (SAB074) and Cat Cave (SAB009). After a short hike, they found SAB074 in the approximate area where it was expected to be according to the old overland survey data. Butch discovered he didn’t have the overland location for SAB009 loaded into his GPS. Sharon, Morgan and Butch brush whacked the area until it started getting pretty late but alas, no cave. They returned to camp at 5:30 pm making the volunteer hours for the three of them, 19.5 hours for the day. Later in the evening, Keith and Butch looked at the map and decided to hunt up Cat Cave in the morning along with some other caves Keith had in mind.

Sunday Butch, Morgan and Keith did some GPS locations in front of Robert’s house. Our first stop was at SAB 259. We did a ten minute average using both Butch’s and my Garmin units. We were back at the vehicles 1½ hours later giving us 4½ total volunteer hours for the day. We made our plans for the May trip and headed home.

The total volunteer hours for both of our groups for both days is 65 hours.
 
 

Total Hours for the May trip was:     191.5
Hours nit reported on the April Trip:  65
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Total hours for the combined trips: 256.5

The May trip marks the end of the 97-98 work season for the TSA CBSP Project. There is interest in continuing a few smaller work trips through the summer as per the "Agreement". We will be preparing another "Agreement" for application this fall upon expiration of the existing "Agreement".
 

On another note, The "Friends of the Park" non profit status of the Central Texas grotto could not be determined at the campground. Keith and Butch did not seem to feel that the CTG would be interested in this. I was not directly involved in the discussion so this should not be the final word. It might be best if "someone" could be at the next CTG meeting to "answer any questions that might arise about this. Dale has not yet been able to read the information that he got on this subject, as he was finishing out the semester. He should be able to get to it soon.