Project Date: December 8-10, 1995 Reported by: Dale Barnard

Person-hours: 234.5

Personnel: (32 folks) Dale Barnard, Christy Quintana, Al Fittipaldi, Pete Baron, Tina Shmid, Jeff Elms, Marc Guther, Kate Baron, Chris Jugge, Mellisa Wierzbichki, Will Harris, Terry Holsinger, Sara Dierk, Butch Fralia, Sharon Mastbrook, Keith Heuss, Benjamin Heuss, Christopher Heuss, Marcus Barksdale, Tom Kaler, John Pipes, Brad Smith, Jim Kennedy, Trent Hodgkins, Daniel Brown, Chris Soben, Robert Brandon, Pat Gerry, Jennifer Hargrove

Apparently, the cold weather works wonders for motivation to stay underground because we had a tremendous turnout and made great progress. On Friday night, the temperature was around 25 degrees, but Saturday night, it dropped to 14.5. We had some very cold cavers, who undoubtedly will be more prepared next time! I suppose all of this progress is unfortunate for me because it makes for a long trip report. Oh well, here goes...

I want to provide some contact information for Terry and me in case you would like additional (or less!) information on the trip reports or need to contact us for other reasons: Dale Barnard Austin, TX  barnard@fc.net. Terry Holsinger Austin, TX 78745. Butch spent 30 hours organizing old trip reports and cave descriptions so that he could provide Terry and me with as much information as he has. He gave us the data on several floppy disks. Thanks Butch!

Here is a synopsis of each team's work over the project weekend. Dale, Christy, and Al spent 7 hours progressing the survey in Sweet Cave. They set 10 stations for 52.77 meters, focusing on the left parts of the cave. At three stations, they tied into Jim's survey, which focused on the right parts of the cave. We left a mud dig lead at station 21 that does not look very promising. Only one more survey should be needed to finish this cave. The remaining survey leads are all off of Jim's data. Jim, Trent, and Daniel spent 7 hours surveying along the right parts of the cave. They set 17 stations of the survey for 67 meters and completed all side-leads as they went. One remaining lead is the north of 17.
Pete, Tina, Kate, and Mellisa spent 6 hourssurveying in Lone Bat (II?) Cave and completed it.
Marc, Jeff, Chris, and Will spent 6 hours surveying in PG Pit and completed it.

Terry and Sara spent 7 hours working in Sweet Cave. Through much labor, they broke up a piece of rock to push what looked like a promising lead. It didn't turn out to go more than about 3 meters, but it branched into 2 more dig leads They would like to return to the cave to determine where the air-flow in the back of the cave goes. They also tried to locate SAB255, but had no luck. They checked Sour Cave and determined that it will require vertical gear to survey it.

Butch, Sharon, Keith, Benjamin, and Christopher spent 7.5 hours on Saturday and 4 more hours on Sunday taking GPS locations using Butch's new Magellen 2000 receiver. They first thought that they discovered an error in the topo map's UTM grid, but on Sunday, they determined that it was okay and that the GPS unit was using a different location system that had made everything appear to be off by 200 meters. They recorded locations for SAB225, SAB226, SAB218, SAB183, SAB182, SAB203, SAB219, SAB239, and SAB244. The GPS strategy looks to be promising since they feel that the accuracy is slightly better than the overland survey in most cases, and it is a lot faster to obtain locations. By some experimentation, they learned that the GPS unit can bring them within eye-shot of any cave, roughly 20-40 feet. They plan to return next trip if it is not too cold for above-ground work and tag the remaining untagged caves and make some additional GPS readings. I am including Butch's data summary that he emailed to Keith for your reference.

Marcus, Tom, John, and Brad spend 7.5 hours surveying 14.5 meters in Horseshoe Cave, completing the East passage, and digging in several passages. They encountered bad air the upper-East passage. They found lots of broken glass, tin cans, aluminum cans, trash bags, etc., mostly in the East passage, which should be removed on future trips. They plan to continue digging 2 leads in the East passage and 2 leads in the West passage.

Chris, Robert, Pat, and Jennifer spend 6 hours completing the survey of the whole cave. They used a hand-line to reach the lower passage. They located two dig leads, one of which appears to take all of the water flow (not currently) and appears very promising. This is Butch's description of the GPS data. The coordinates are UTM—referenced to NAD27—zone, meters east, and meters north. The calculated measurement from Bend comes from a CD-ROM package I have called P-MAP (precision mapping).It gives Lon/Lat wherever the mouse is pointing. It has some cad capability, I wish it could be used to produce a map of CBSP but the topo detail isn't there.