Chris Hall, Jennifer Lemak, Tim Stich, Tara Martin,Jim Kennedy, Randy Brown, Erin Vreeland, Chjris Vreeland,Dale Barnard, Rachel Bosch, Rosanne Larson, Justin Shaw, Brice Leech, Aimee Beverage, Walter Pickett, David Turner,Justin Atkision, Ed Goff, Laura Gogg, Lisa Schlieker, Russ Johnson, Robert Albach, Keith Heuss, Ben Heuss, Chris Heuss, Butch Fralia, Sharron Mastbrook.

Team one, Chris Hall, Jennifer Lemak, Tim Stich, and Tara Martin left camp at 12:00 and followed Jim Kennedy to the caves Sab 211 and Sab 212. They entered SAB212 and surveyed it. It is a short crawl through porcupine needles, and molding droppings, to a room with a skylight. This room leads to a lower crevice-pit. Progress was stopped as the crevice was to narrow, thought it may be able to be widened for further progress. The cave was named "Inhospitable Mouse Cave" for the Rude mouse seen scurrying away from the surveyors near  the end of the cave. after exiting the cave they entered Sab211 and noticed fresh animal scat. they Flagged the "trail" to the caves. They returned to camp a 5:00 for a total of 20 hours.

Team two, Jim Kennedy, Randy Brown, Erin Vreeland, and Chris Vreeland first showed team one to there caves, They then headed to the Lost Petzl System to survey "Cave of Many Names". They started the survey at a untagged entrance that had a "Danger" sign. They surveyed 109 meters and connected a total of Four entrances. to the cave. It "ends" downstream as a bedding plane crawl, that could use a small amount of  dirt removed. This should allow this cave to be pushed till it connects with Chimn Delight. Erin "Frogged" her way out of this her second vertical cave. The team then checked out a 100 foot virgin cave near Chimn Delight. They returned to camp at 5:30 for a total of 24 hours.

Team Three, Dale Barnard, Rachel Bosch, Rosanne Larson, Justin Shaw, Brice Leech and Terry Holsinger, went to finish the survey of BAC/FF. On the way Terry found a new Moss covered "entrance" with a strong breez, near Chim Delight. After trying to stuff Justin into the hole, Rachel tried it and also found it to tight. It is most likely another small entrance to Chim delight. We then headed to Bear's Breath where Brice moved to rock that blocked progress last project weekend. Terry H. felt to new entrance was a little tight so he let Dale enter it. The tight entrance crevice leads to a 40-45 foot drop from which the light from one of the other entrances in the system cane be seen. The drop needs rope. Then all but Terry entered BAC/FF to help Dale finish the sketch. Justin, and Rosanne left early to survey Chris2, which Dale saw there lights while in BAC/FF. Meanwhile Terry hiked over to Railroad Crowbar & Cavity Creep were he ran into Butch and Keith. This part of the park has not seen a lot of ridge-walking because of the dense Cedar trees. He then started down the fence towards Lively pasture. At the fence junction he noted some of the Karst features and saw enough top feel a lot of work is needed in this corner. he then started back to BAC/FF when he noticed a small rocky-mossy sink in a grove of trees. After looking under a few rocks he headed down "stream" and found a new entrance in another clump of oak trees. Going back to get more people to explore this new cave, he noticed 2 more entrances, and a couple of good sink leads. Returning with Brice, Rachel, Justin, Rosanne, and he thought Dale, Brice and Justin entered the cave. After exploring for about a hour they exited, saying the cave is maze like and has lots of "BUGS". They explored over 100 meters. All then headed to the trucks were they meet Dale, who had lost his way in the trees and dark and decided to go to the trucks. They made it back to camp at 6:00 for a total of 42 hours.

Team Four, Butch Fralia, Ben Heuss ,Chris Heuss ,Keith Heuss ,Sharon Mastbrook
 OK, it was another GPS/DGPS/Notebook Computer weekend.  Keith rented the AccqPoint DGPS receiver for the weekend that we used in June.  AccqPoint provides or rather provided a one meter DGPS correction that we were going to use to set a couple of more benchmarks to use for testing the accuracy of future GPS measurements.  Keith arrived at the park in his new traveling Taj Mahal armed with the AccqPoint, his own GPS equipment, an arsenal of cable and high hopes for the weekend.
 Butch and Sharon arrived later to find Keith and the boys already on the park and crashed for the evening.  Butch's Suburban is sporting a rebuilt rear differential these days.  On the way home from CBSP last month, the differential in the Suburban locked up in Lometa.  Turns out the truck was special ordered and a compatible differential could not be located at any wrecking yard in a five state area.  The only alternative was to walk or order all new parts.  Well, it's 167 miles to CBSP from SW Fort Worth so walking is not a viable option for a two day weekend.  The final bill was $2,367.47, this volunteer stuff is expensive!
 The first thing was to set up the AccqPoint DGPS unit and establish a bench mark around camp.  Miller Blueprint in Austin where Keith rented the unit wasn't sure if it would work and it was rented with a money-back guarantee.  AccqPoint is going out of business and it isn't certain if any of the Texas providers are still on-line.  That question was answered first by extending the DGPS antenna up to twenty feet using a two ten foot sections of PVC pipe, cut at one foot intervals, and joined by PVC pipe nipples.  This set up was left over from overland survey and a survey class in Fort Worth.  The reason for this was that the reception from AccqPoint back in June of 1997 was marginal.  The question was quickly settled by the fact that the AccqPoint unit never locked onto a provider station.  Scratch AccqPoint DGPS - get money back on Monday!
 Last month, two Garmin 12 GPS units were used along with a notebook computer in an attempt to make the GPS cave location readings more accurate.  One GPS unit was placed in a fixed location then connected to a notebook computer.  The notebook computer and the fixed unit logged the SA drift for the day, using a shareware program called SA-Watch.  Fifty to one hundred samples were taken at each cave visited using the track log feature of the mobile Garmin 12 unit.  Theoretically it's possible to use two receivers, one at a known location monitoring the SA error and the other at the location you want a location measurement on.  Assuming the units are close enough together to see the same satellites, one can be used to correct the other by looking at the SA drift occurring at the same exact time.
 Keith spent a lot of time writing a program to compare the track log from the Garmin Rover and match up to the time stamp from the fixed unit.  The end result was that the SA-Watch file could be corrected back to within one meter but there seemed to be no relationship to the data from the Rover unit.  OK, punt!  It seemed like it could be possible to haul the notebook computer and the GPS unit around and using SA-Watch recording 30 minutes of data then run it through Keith's program.
 Since the AccqPoint receiver was useless, a number of data points taken with the AccqPoint unit were available.  The first half day on Saturday was spent using the notebook computer connected to one of the Garmin GPS 12 receivers to determine the viability of Keith's software massaging the data file produced in SA-Watch.  Some of these points are, one corner of the fire-pit, the fence post at the entrance to the park and the USGS Benchmark.  The net result was that the program worked great if you know the answer before hand.  In other words, if you know the location, you can correct all the readings back to that location within one meter.
 What all this boils down to is that the original method of averaging data at a cave location for ten to thirty minutes is about as accurate as you can get without:  1)  Getting the DCI DGPS equipment to work or 2) Buying post processing GPS equipment from one of the major manufacturers like Magellan or Trimble.  The equipment mentioned in option 2 is available but the cost is way above and beyond the call of volunteerism.  Butch is bugging DCI to get the Brownwood station mentioned as an up and coming station on the DCI web page in operation.  Brownwood is about 40 miles from the park via radio waves and since the DCI unit has proven to work reliably out to 65 miles from the service provider, that seems like the best economic solution.  Back in June when Butch first contacted DCI, the station was supposed to come on-line in the Fall.  In November when the purchased the DCI-3000 receiver, it was scheduled to be on-line in January.  It's time!
 Why do all this stuff?  Well, the first method of determining cave locations was overland survey.  That had it's problems, it's reasonably accurate over short distances but takes a tremendous amount of time.  It's still useful to overland survey between multi-entrance caves.  It has the problem that if one point in the survey is miscalculated of misread, the remaining part of the survey is off.  We've found that the UTM location of some caves is off by as much as 300 meters.  Averaging GPS locations for ten minutes at each location is much faster and to date, the locations that can correlated are within 20 meters 95% of the time and 30 meters the rest of the time.  Using GPS to navigate to the caves where GPS locations have been taken will usually get you within 65 feet (20 meters) of the cave.  At the very least, using GPS, more cave location can be taken in a short amount of time than with overland survey.
 The second half of the day on Saturday was spent taking GPS readings on caves that have not previously had the GPS experience.  These were Railroad Crowbar (SAB189), Cavity Creep (SAB190) and Be Excellent (SAB219).  Ten minute or longer averages were taken at each cave.  Based on the previous experience with the AccqPoint equipment, the accuracy of this type of measurement is within 20 meters, 95% of the time.  That's close enough for government work.
 That finished out the weekend except for one final note:  When Butch and Sharon arrived home, they found their house had been broken into.  The bathroom window was broken out, the VCR, a sewing machine and a handful of video tapes were missing.  In addition the television was damaged (antenna connector broke) when the thieves jerked the antenna connector off instead of unscrewing it.  This all happened when we were at CBSP.  This volunteer stuff is expensive but it's still a lot of fun.  The house will fixed and trips continued.
 Next month, there's a possibility of using a military GPS for cave locations.  Once that's done, the task will be to get GPS locations on all the known caves.  Afterward, the task will be to get GPS locations on all the Karst features known on the park.

Averaged measurements:
Note: Datum NAD27 Conus
Railroad Crowbar Cave (SAB189):
Cavity Creep Cave (SAB190):
Be Excellent Cave (SAB219):

Total hours for team was 20.
 

 Team Five,Robert Albach, Justin Atkinson, Lisa Schlerner, Amiee Bevrage, Russ Johnson left camp also at noon, and headed to survey Elmo's Hole, Moose Twit, and Porcupine Cave. They hoped they would be able to find the caves as none of them had ever been to this part of the park. First they found Elmo's Hole. The tightness of the entrance proved to small for any in the group to enter, so they found the next cave in the area. They surveyed Porcupine Cave, SAB253, leaving a dig at the basck for later. They then located Moose Twit, SAB250, and surveyed it noticeing the signs of a small bat colony, guano on floor & marks on celing. The cave ends in a "cemented" brackdown pile. Further progress is not expected. They made it back to camp at 7:30 for a total of 37.5 hours.

Total hours for project weekend were: 143.5