How Long is Punkin Cave?
Punkin Cave serves as a wonderful way to get new cavers and potential surveyors underground to useful purpose. Kudos to those who keep plugging away at this project. It has been announced that Punkin Cave, presently at 13,400+ feet, is now the 10th longest cave in Texas and the 369th longest cave in the United Sates, having surpassed such caves as Kartchner Caverns (Arizona), Adams' Cave, and Caverns of Sonora in Texas. It seems to me that this is a classic example of confusing the length of survey lines applied to a cave with its actual "length." When caves are reasonably linear and not too wide, a survey line down the down the "center" of the passage with occasional shots to the side to establish wall location will give a good idea of the length so long as the side shots are not counted as length. The reality is that not all caves are that easy to assign a meaningful length number. Consider Grutas de Bustamante. It's a huge, booming passage, often several hundred feet wide but with little in the way of side passages. There has been a lot of survey activity in there over the years, most notably the heroic effort by Jan and Orion Knox. the passage is really too wide to survey by just moving down the middle. Some survey efforts have gone down one wall, and then returned along the other. Did the combined length of those survey lines double the length of the cave? Consider Endless Cave (New Mexico). It's a complicated maze cave with only a few traditional linear passages. I couldn't tell you how long it is because the traditional notion of "length" is nonsense in this situation. When the survey was completed, it was noted that more than 10,000 feet of survey lines were required. Another way to look at that is to state that by traveling a non-repetitious 10,000-foot circuit, one might reasonably claim that they had "seen" the cave. The situation at Punkin Cave is even more extreme. Here, there is an irregular but somewhat pyramidal void mostly filled with cemented breakdown. To date, nowhere is it possible to be more than a few hundred feet from the surface datum. To laboriously survey multiple, interconnecting routes through such a three-dimensional maze and then add the survey lines together for a "length" is absurd. The point farthest from the entrance datum is ~350 feet. If the "length" of the entrance drop is subtracted, the figure is even less. The entire known cave is contained within a space 460 feet long, 200 feet wide, and 210 feet high. How "long" is Punkin Cave? You decide, but please don't ask me to believe its presently known length is more than 2.5 miles! ===Carl Kunath
