Gill is always so elegant in his wording. I appreciate his perspective here.
And as usual, he is right. When I started the Mirror Lake Restoration Project
at CCNP, we all (Dale, Tom, me) thought it would a quick easy. That was until I
did my first test patch in Oct. 2005. Now, if I get a 3 inch square complete in
a day, I am happy. And everything I am dealing with is from human intervention
in the cave.
At the deepest level of debris we have foot traffic mud from the Jim White
days. Then we get trail building materials on top of that from the different
trail evolutions. Add some splashing from years of hosing down the trails to
keep them clean, what you end up with is a fine concrete of gunk on top of
beautiful cave floor & formation. In places it may only be a couple of
millimeters thick, in others we have pulled out as much as 18" of debris.
Next, all this fragile beauty was formed over gypsum. Sadly many areas have
cracks or have broken and turned to dust under the pattering of human feet.
This has led to water dripping and oozing down to the gypsum dissolving it and
creating hollow spots. In short, what was once an underground oasis of
beautiful color and varying shapes in design, turned into a dark, dirty,
unsightly spot in this miraculous cave. With lighting, much was and still is
hidden. But with a flash light one may now experience shades of yellow, white,
dove grey, purple, orange, red, white and blackish greys. Hidden in the gunk
was cave coral, cave pearl nest, small stalagmites, rim stone dams, lilly
pads small pools and so much more.
But still the conflict remains. The only way to keep caves pristine is to
stay out of them. Even with all we know about caving softly, we still impact
the environment with our very presence. And so the dilemma continues. To cave
or not to cave! Personnaly, I choose to cave. May science reign, exploration
continue and the human experience become enriched by the marvels of nature!
Karen
At 02:40 PM 1/23/2008, Geary Schindel wrote:
>Regarding your comment about whether speleothems
>should be removed for use in scientific
>interest. Well that depends � most scientists
>are very responsible about the removal of
>speleothems and would not recommend that
>prominent formations be removed and if a
>specimen needed to be collected, that it be done
>so to minimize the impacts to a cave.
Breaking or damaging cave formations
(speleothems) has always been a philosophical No
No within the caving community. The subject and
the activity have received a lot of lip service
and have been prominent points of cave
conservation drilled into the minds of newbies
using the force of peer pressure. Speleothem
damage is routinely found appalling by cavers in
public statements--verbal or written. But that is
not necessarily the way formation removal is looked at by cavers in a cave.
There are at least 2 camps, one pretty much on
either end of the spectrum, of what one does in a
cave when coming upon a nearly solid,
impassable wall of columns blocking the way to a
borehole passage on the other side of that
curtain, clearly visible through unclosed gaps.
One camp says that the need to break a formation
in order to continue exploration means that the
cave ends there. The sanctity of the formation is
paramount and precludes further exploration. The
other camp pulls out a hammer and, being as
conservative as possible, smashes a minimum of
formations and, hopefully, in a location which
will offer minimal negative visual impact. But
smash formations they do, and without remorse of
any effective sort. Pure exploration is the name
of the game and it must be pursued at all costs.
One of the main realities of the actions of these
two camps is that the conservationist purists go
into a cave on Saturday and turn around as is
their wont, leaving the cave formations otherwise
undisturbed, sacrificing their own exploration
urges in the name of "doing what's right", then
the exploration oriented crew goes into the cave
on Sunday, smashes a hole through the curtain and
scoops the booty. Who won here?
I think most cavers, while giving lip service to
the rule of never breaking cave formations, would
fall into the second camp when confronted with
the reality of cave exploration. Is that
hypocritical? In it's purist philosophical form,
probably, but in practice it is merely a method
of teaching and instilling a high awareness and
practice of cave conservation in all cavers, new
and established, while retaining some personal
responsibility for making a decision to sacrifice
a formation in pursuit of doing what one is there
to do--explore the damned cave. That concept
reeks of justification but, I think, most
top-notch cavers have resolved the situation to
where it doesn't bother them at all--so long as
they are otherwise conscientious about how it's done. To wit:
One of the people who inf
