Reported by Dale Barnard

12 Persons

Keith Heuss	Alvis Hill	Mark Gee	Marshall Gee	Rebecca O’Daniel
Dale Barnard	Denise Prendergast	James Lopez	Wes King	Bill Tucker
Will Harris	Terry Holsinger

Saturday Crew: Dale Barnard, Denise Prendergast, James Lopez, Wes King, Bill Tucker, Will Harris
6 hours * 6 people = 36 hours

This crew worked on the Back Country Trail. They started near the cattle pond and worked their way toward Lively Pasture, completing nearly a mile of trail, some of which had been started by other volunteer groups. The day turned out to be quite warm and when drinking water ran low, dehydration began setting in and the crew was forced to hike back to the caver camp to refuel.
 After a short rest at camp, they drove to the conference center and then down the hill where the mowers were making the state park look like a fishing camp again. The crew swam in the river and collected ticks in the tall grass hiking back up to the vehicles.
 Since Wes and Bill had been hoping to get some caving in, the whole gang packed up and drove to a parking area near Sweet Cave. They gained a group member—Wes’s mother Carol—along the way. Carol, Wes, Will, and Bill went in Sweet Cave and an hour or two. Dale, James, and Denise planned to work on the trail more, but Dale’s truck had a hissing tire. With a looming thunderstorm, the team decided to drive back to camp and get the spare put on before the storm hit. As it turns out, the storms went all around us, creating a great lightening show, but hardly dropped anything worth mentioning on us.

Sunday Crew: Dale Barnard, Denise Prendergast, (((((Terry Holsinger??)))))
2 hours * 2 people = 4 hours

 Denise and Dale parked at the cattle pond and headed down the trail toward the office. They relocated two sections of trail that another crew had pinned along the fence. This section of the trail will need some work, but today was not the day to do it since it is adequately marked for now. They built a few dozen cairns before arriving at the point where the fence line contacts the main road. Beyond this point, along the old road that connects to the Spicewood Trail, they found only a trace of the road still visible in the overgrown grass. Most of the road will need to be marked with cairns or regular driven to keep it visible. They built a few cairns along the first part of the road, but grew weary and hungry and began the mile-or-so hike back to the cattle pond where they had parked.

Driving time to/from the park: 36 hours
Total activity: 36 + 4 + 36 = 76 hours

Colorado Bend State Park, partial report for Keith Heuss, April 13 & 14, 2002

Personnel:  Keith Heuss, Alvis Hill, Mark Gee, Marshall Gee, and Rebecca O’Daniel

 Saturday, we visited the Cox ranch and Mark Gee surveyed two caves, one only partially.  I stayed above ground and did some GPS work on the Cox Ranch property boundary.  Since the Cox ranch shares a fence with the Colorado Bend State Park, this included some GPS locations of the park boundary.

 Sunday, Alvis showed us a few caves located a half-mile from the caver’s camp.  We entered the first cave and explored it to its end.  It has porcupine quills in the entrance when Alvis first discovered the entrance.  All of the quills were gone this time.  He wanted to call it porcupine cave, but that cave is already taken so we called it PP Cave.  This stands for Porcupine Poop, which was found in the entrance.  We did a gps of the cave and tagged it with the id pp cave.

 Next Alvis headed to another dig cave he and his dad had worked on in previous years.  On the way there I noticed a small hole going down between some rocks.  Everyone had seen it and had just walked over it.  I said, “Lets dig on it” when I saw it.  We spend about an hour digging on it and found a hole going down about 15 feet deep.  It is only wide enough for a small person to enter only 6 to 8 feet before it comes too narrow.  We named it Centaricket Cave, naming it after a centipede type critter that has long legs like a cricket.  We gpsed it and headed to the other cave that Alvis knew of.

 At the other cave, which has an impressive entrance, we checked out the cave to see if it went.  It only goes a few feet, not enough to be classified as a cave.  It is a dig and may turn out to be something some day.  I did a gps of the entrance and we called it impressive entrance cave.

 All gps locations are entered on my spreadsheet that I am keeping for the project.  Total work time for me on Saturday is 1 hour.  Five of us spent two hours on Sunday documenting Alvis’ caves for a total of 11 hours.
 

Total time for weekend 105.0.