Aboveground caves are more common than most people realize. One that is known to many Texas cavers is the plywood cube maze that was erected at several Texas Caver Reunions and certain other caver events. This structure obviously was above ground, and, although it didn't look much like a natural cave, it was advertised as a "cave" by the cavers who built it and who crawled around inside it.
A more realistic looking aboveground cave existed inside a restaurant in the Denver Colorado area, back when I lived their during the early 1980s. The restaurant served all-you-can-eat Mexican food of a quality that didn't encourage people to eat very much, but you had to buy a dinner in order to get in. Its main attraction was a very large building fixed up like a multi-theme theme park inside. It had multiple dining areas, each elaborately decorated according to a different theme. A couple of these areas were very cave-like inside. From time to time, it was common for Colorado cavers to go there for an after-dinner evening of pseudocaving in these aboveground caves, especially during winter, when most of Colorado's underground caves were inaccessible because of snow. An even more realistic artificial cave was built inside the Florida State Museum in Gainesville Florida during the early 1970s, when I was a student at the University of Florida and was caving with the Florida Speleological Society (FSS). The museum people building this artificial cave took great care to make it resemble a real typical Florida cave as much as they could, including routing the air conditioning through side passages and regulating the temperature and humidity to resemble natural air flow in a real Florida cave. Fortunately, Florida's typical cave temperatures were naturally comfortable. The museum staff collaborated with FSS cavers and visited several real Florida caves during the planning of this project. We were especially impressed with the technique they used for constructing remarkably realistic artificial formations by applying many layers of slow setting epoxy, which slowly flowed and dripped as it set, gradually building up multi-layer coatings resembling the shapes and surfaces of natural stalactites, stalagmites, and flowstone. After it was completed, cavers often amused themselves by photographing inside this artificial cave and slipping the slides into slide shows of real caves to see if other cavers could notice the difference. Unless cavers were already familiar with the Florida State Museum cave, the pictures were often realistic enough to fool experienced cavers. Technically, the Florida State Museum cave might have been either aboveground or underground, or perhaps a combination of both, since the Florida State Museum building was partly above and partly below ground level. If you search hard enough, I bet you can find many more examples of "aboveground caves". Has anyone ever bothered to compile a list? Rod Brian Vauter wrote: > The caption makes use of the ever popular "underground cave" > catchphrase used by the press. > > I wish just once we could find one of the aboveground caves. That > would make things so much easier. > >
