Colorado Bend State Park Project

Project Date: May 10, 2003

Reported by: Terry Holsinger

Report Date: June 4, 2003

Person-hours: 106.5

Personnel: (8 folks) Chris Hall, Terry Holsinger, Bobby de Vos, Butch Fralia, Keith Heuss, Edward Sevcik, Dale Barnard, James Lopez

Travel hours: 43.0

Team One was James Lopez, Chris Hall, and Bobby de Vos. They crossed the river and then split into a two sub teams, James Lopez headed off to video tape Jaime’s Carlsbad Connection Cave, check the air quality, and retrieve a rope that had been left from a previous trip. The air in the cave was too bad to permit safe entry, but the rope was retrieved and James headed back across the river, leaving the other team of Chris and Bobby to continue on their survey of KH4 now named “1000 Pound Rock”. They started the survey and ended up Finding much more cave then they could survey in a single weekend. This amount of survey, exploration and travel time meant that this team only returned to camp at 11:30 pm making them the last team into camp and only 30 minutes from the dispatch of an investigative team to make sure they were not lost in the thick brush on the other side of the river. As it stands now this is the deepest cave on the other side of the river at –23.4 meters deep and 39 meters surveyed so far. They intend to return to this cave in the fall and continue the survey. They also remarked on the difficulty of access much of the across the river portions of the park, due to the heavy undergrowth, lack of trails or roads, and the distances traveled from the river (~3klm). There has been a little talk about clearing a path to aid in the access up the bluff from the river and maybe connecting it to the existing (but faint) old ranch road that transverses most of this part of the park. However no one has decided they want to put that much effort yet.

Total hours for this team: 33.5

Team Two was Edward Sevcik. He spent six hours hiking ~19klm along the new trail (and along the river bank and old trails) looking for points of interest to include on a future interruptive flier for this trail. He will be working with Dale on updating Dales information for this flier.

Total hours for this team: 6.0

Team Three was Butch Fralia and Keith Heuss This team came prepared to do some in cave video work for our project to produce a video for the park service to use. We had to resort to plan B due to the fact that they were short staffed this weekend and John could not get away to star in our video.

Plan B is a continuing project to cover the park with post SA GPS locations for all of the cave locations. This was my first month working with Butch with his new Garmin Vista WAAS GPS unit. WAAS is an improvement over post SA processing. Accuracies of up to 3 Meters are now possible with WAAS.

Our first stop was at Rune=s Bad Air Cave, SAB241. We noted that the tag is installed at the cave. Next stop was Nila=s Very First Cave, SAB254. The cave also had a tag installed. On the way to Nila=s Cave, we came across two Karst Features. We got a GPS location on each one of them before proceeding over the fence to Nila=s Cave. The second Karst Feature has been dug in the past. Neither one has a tag. We assigned the numbers SAK066 and SAK067 to them as we saved the GPS locations.

Back over the fence and to the road was our next task. While walking down the road, Zane drove up. We talked to him for a while. While talking to him, we noticed another park vehicle coming up the road. It had lights on the top and we assumed it to be a game warden. The window came down and from inside we heard the words AI know you.@ It was Steve Densmore. Steve came with the park when the park service bought the land in the mid 1980's. Steve had shown us Blue Ribbon Cave and had told us of two other caves, Railroad Crowbar and Cavity Creep. We talked to him for a while and Cory drove up. We had a mini convention in the roadway. Soon it became time to go.

Our next stop was the Lively Pasture. We have four more caves to do to finish up the pasture as far as GPS locations are concerned. We looked for SAB224 for a while, but we couldn’t find it. Stickers were thick and we decided not to look any more for the caves. We drove over to the area where we had baited some fire ant mounds with yellow corn meal some months back. Most that we could find were all killed out.

Our last stop was the windmill to get a GPS location on it. We did and headed back to camp. Upon further examination, Butch realized that his GPS was set to WGS84 datum instead of NAD27. He will correct the numbers and email them back to me during the week. All locations will be reported in my spreadsheet of locations that I am keeping.

Total hours for this team was: 17.0

Team Four was Dale Barnard and Terry Holsinger. After meeting with Cory and dropping off the paper work they headed out to check and replace the do not enter signs that had been placed on the “tourist” caves in the past. All the signs were in place on the tourist caves and they ended up replacing the missing sign on “Gorman Creek Crevice” and they placed a sign in the entrance to “Tight Slide Crevice” as it is relatively easy to find from the primitive campsite by the windmill. However this was not before hiking all the way out to these cave only to notice that while they had the hammer drill, signs, and studs they had forgotten the hammer, and wrench need to place the studs and fix the signs to the studs. This of course necessitated the return to the trucks at the trailhead and then another return to the caves back in the pasture.

Total hours for this team was: 12.0