Personnel: Ed Goff, Nico Hauwert, Wayne Peplinski, Rafal Kedzierski, Butch Fralia, Ben Heuss, Chris Heuss, Keith Heuss, Rosanne Larson, Sharon Mastbrook, Dale Barnard, Denise Pendergast, Ernest Sifuentes, Terry Holsinger, Lisa Rowan, Tony Sultana, Richard Sultana, Jonathan Wilson, Russ Johnson, Jack Johnson, Jessica Snider, Justin Hutto
 

Team X: Ed Goff, Nico Hauwert, Wayne Peplinski, Rafal Kedzierski
We returned to Scorpion Pit (SAB289) this month to continue to try to enlarge the entrance enough to get down. The entrance is a chimney about 0.2-0.8 m by 1-1.5 m, which drops about 10 m to open into the ceiling of a room. The tightest constriction, two-thirds of the way down, prevented passage. Nico went in first to work with the hammer drill, but it began to malfunction. When he came out for a break, Rafal Kedzierski came strolling up through the woods. Wayne went down to have a go; meanwhile Rafal and Nico decided to investigate another cave (Sumps Below, SAB245), borrowing my GPS to record its location. Wayne and I continued taking turns shaving rock from the constriction. We moved our efforts from one side of the chimney to the other, which, although it looked smaller, felt larger when we tried to squeeze into it. The hammer drill soon died completely, and our two other non-hammer drills proved ineffectual on the hard, solid limestone, so we reverted to a 3 lb. hammer to chip at the rock grain by grain. Around 5:30, Wayne emerged from a shift and announced he'd had enough. I went down to have one more go at it and decided to try again to squeeze through. I made it and descended into the room below the chimney. I was rappelling with a Munter hitch on a shoulder-height carabiner tied to my harness with Spectra cord, in order to have the smallest possible profile. I backed it up with an ascender above the hitch. As I entered the room, I neglected to slide the ascender down the rope, and my weight came onto it. I called up to Wayne to lower me another ascender to use to get myself unstuck. (This was our plan anyway; I was carrying minimal gear on my way down.) While I waited for it, I tested the air with a lighter. Until now the air had been good, and I had felt a cool upward draft in the chimney. Now the lighter would not light at all. I raised it as far as I could above my head and got a flame with a 1-1.5" gap beneath it. Given the tightness of the chimney above me, I felt I needed to get back up into good air soon. I tied off a loop of rope to step up in and got my weight off the ascender just as Wayne lowered a bag to me. In the bag were a camera and an ascender on a length of cord. I snapped 3 pictures and then started up. Apparently the high CO2 concentration had begun very abruptly at the top of the room in the undisturbed air. When I had dropped into it and stirred it up, it had begun to swirl up the chimney. On my way out I found the air very bad all the way up past the constriction. My footloop snagged on a rock as I entered the chimney and I had to down-climb to free it. Climbing through the squeeze was extremely difficult in bad air, since heavy breathing made it hard to exhale fully. After struggling a while I got through and came up into the indescribably delicious fresh air of early evening. We heard menacing pig noises as we started the hike back to camp. The room below the chimney is about 8 or 10 m long, 2-3 m wide, and 2-3 m high. A 0.5 m-wide crack runs most of the length of the floor. I could not see the bottom of it. A crawlway enters the room on one side near the chimney; water was seen trickling out of this in March.
Total time at SAB289 for team X: 18.0

Personnel: Butch Fralia, Ben Heuss, Chris Heuss, Keith Heuss, Rosanne Larson, Sharon Mastbrook.
 Our time this weekend consisted of looking for more caves to obtain GPS locations for. In working with marked up maps from the TSS files and entering the data into the TSS database, I located maps with caves marked on the CBSP property. These caves, Coon Cave, and Wedge had not been specifically relocated and identified. We undertook to find these two caves.
 We started in the Gorman Falls Pasture, parking near SAB263 (Little Labyrinth Cave). From there, we started walking in the direction of Wedge Cave while looking for two cave or karst features I’d located about four years ago and wanted more definite locations on.
We located one feature (that could be a cave) in the north end of the McLarrin Fissure System that doesn’t appear on Kastnig’s map. We moved around the area, locating Meander Tube and Offset Fissures verifying we were outside the area of identified fissures. We took a ten-minute average on the location and designated the fissure GPF001.
Moving right along, we located another fissure in the area of where Wedge Cave should be located but on the wrong side of a dry creek bottom. We took GPS data and noted the fissure to be non-climbable but would probably qualify as a cave. We gave the Fissure the GPS designation of GPF002.
We located another fissure we designated as GPF003. While I took GPS data, Keith climbed down into the entrance. We noted it to be a 20’ deep climbable fissure near a dry spring bed. It takes water when the stream comes up as indicated by feeder debris both in the fissure and around the entrance. Keith scratched his arm on the way out and thought we should name it Stinging Cave. He didn’t identify any passage at the bottom of the fissure.
We then located a deep fissure at the location marked on the topographic map for SAB171 (Wedge Cave). The fissure was about fifty feet deep and non-climbable. The problem is the fissure doesn’t match the description of Wedge Cave. Wedge is supposedly a fifteen-foot deep fissure with passage extending off for one hundred feet, ending when the passage becomes blocked by formations. That more closely sounds like the GPF002 Fissure we located earlier. I’ll retain the location for the moment as Wedge Cave but as some point in time both fissures need to be entered and the true Wedge Cave identified.
Coon cave as described in the old records is located on a bluff above Gorman Cave. However, unless there was a misprint or the wrong cave, it’s located above the north side of Gorman Creek. It’s described as a forty foot deep pit with a four foot by one foot crevice like entrance. The old map location from the TSS office showed the cave as being near the fence in Lively Pasture. We couldn’t tell from the map which side of the fence the cave is on. We went to Lively Pasture to locate the cave and determined that if the map is correct, the cave is located about 750’ east of park property. Being the cave isn’t on park property, we didn’t pursue the location further.
At the point where Gorman Creek comes onto Park property (feeding the stock tank in Lively Pasture) the fence was nearly crushed down with dead wood having washed down the creek. We removed the wood from the fence in hopes of keeping it from destroying the park boundary fence in that area.
We returned to camp where I plotted the locations onto my ArcView Park Map and entered the data into the TSS database (via my laptop computer). I also obtained data from Ed Goff on the cave he, Wayne Peplinski and Nico are working with, along with two features he took location data on. Rafal also gave me some updated locations he took using Ed’s GPS.
Cave Data:
Datum: NAD27
GPF001: XXXXX XXXXX (located on north end of McLarrin Fissure System but not on Kastnig’s map.
GPF002: XXXXX XXXXX (non-climbable fissure in the area of Wedge Cave and GPF003).
GPF003: XXXXX XXXXX (20’ climbable fissure entered by Keith Heuss. He named the fissure Stinging Cave. Appears to take water when the dry stream rises as indicated by feeder debris in and around the cave).
SAB171 (?): XXXXX XXXXX (Wedge Cave? Fissure is non-climbable and deeper than the description of Wedge Cave. Needs to be explored and compared with the Wedge Cave description.)
Time for team: 36.0
 

The team of Dale Barnard, Denise Pendergast, Ernest Sifuentes started the day off by visiting Ice Box and New Orleans caves to prepare for the Boy Scout Invasion on Earth Day. They then headed to Lively Pasture to locate and tag a few features. They failed to locate the feature by the dam, however they managed to located and tagged (K22 & K23) two features noted by Debbie Blackburn on a previous trip. Theses are located ~40 meters from SAB217. Dale having forgot the survey tape, these were left unconnected to the surface survey. After locating Gorman Creek Crevice for a reference they headed for the trucks. "About 5 Minuets" before SAB186 they located and tagged ,K24, an unmarked feature. This has a "bounce-bounce" drop and a lot of loose dirt. They built a cairn and continued towards the trucks. They noted two other features upstream of G.C.C. but without a survey tape the continued to the trucks and back to camp. Dale will return and tie these into the surface survey on next trip.
Total hours for team: 27.0
 

Jonathan Wilson was a self contained team this trip. He had purchased a GPS unit and was wanting to try it out, so after getting some GPS locations from Terry Holsinger, he headed out to try and find these caves. He had never been to any of the caves he had locations for, so this was a blind test to see if someone unfamiliar with the park and its caves could use the GPS locations to locate specific caves. After 8 hours in the field he had only been able to locate 2 of the four caves he tried to find. Of the two he found, he was unable to locate a tag for either one, so there is a little question as to if he found the caves he was looking for, or mear found other ones. This test demonstrates the lack of accuracy of GPS in finding a small entrance  without more information as to the cave entrance’s location and description. This is good as it means that if this information gets to the "general public" that they should not have an easy time locating these caves.
Total time for this team: 8.0
 

The team of Terry Holsinger, Lisa Rowan, Tony Sultana, Richard Sultana headed to the Gorman Creek Crevice area to "resurvey" the surface loop between Gorman Creek Crevice, Horseshoe Chimney, and Be Excellent,( the Upper Gorman Creek System)  as well as the other surface features in this area. They also attempted to maintain a good vertical control, so that there would be a better understanding of the subsurface goings on.
Total time for this team: 20.0

The team of Russ Johnson, Jack Johnson, Jessica Snider, Justin Hutto headed back to Gorman Creek Crevice. The goal this trip was to make it back to the stream in the cave and see what the end of survey had in store. The cave had seen a good deal of water from the heavy rains three weeks before, so the gravel crawl needed redigging to allow all but the smallest of cavers through. As is normal after these heavy rains the air quality was good all the way to the "back" of the cave. Unfortunately the cave sumped near the end of the survey, so this leaves the bottom of the pit as the last going easy lead in this cave.
Total time for this team: 40.0 hours.

This trip followed a heavy rain a couple of weeks earlier, 3 inches of rain in 2 hours. Signs of this rain were every were in the park, piles of flood debris, and water flattened grass through out. All the caves of the Upper Gorman Creek System had taken Large amounts of water. This is also true for the Gorman Cave recharge basin as water was flowing out the entrance of Gorman Cave. This type of rain event is normally followed by good air in many of the caves, and this weekend was no different. The May trip may be the last trip of the season, depends on how the air is and how hot it gets.

Total time for weekend:149.0