Come along with us as we return to a local landowners property here in Franklin County, Tennessee where he has dug open a spring cave with a track hoe for us to explore! We had first visited this property back in May and explored some known caves and starting digging on a good blowing lead. One of the caves that we were not able to get into that first day was this spring cave. The landowner later then used a track hoe to dig it out for us so we could easily get into it to explore.
A month later we returned at the end of July to finish digging open the entrance and explore the cave to see what we were getting into (cavers refer to this as scooping or scooping booty!). Now that we know what we are dealing with, we decided to wait for a dry spell before we went back to push it further. We also knew we wanted to go ahead and start a cave survey so we know where the cave is trending under the mountainside.
On this day we decided to start off with our survey at the entrance and push it for as far as we could before we explored more cave. It was a pleasant surprise when we entered the cave to find the water levels a lot lower in the first section of cave than they were last time. We did however, end up getting into some low, wet crawls where it seems the water is ponding and will always be an issue. We surveying 1097.6' of cave passage before we decided to put the instruments away and push ahead further in the cave. To our surprise, we found several large upper passages and still have air. It will take a bit more surveying and pushing to see where this cave is going. Hopefully we can explore more before the winter water levels come back up and shut us out of the cave until next summer!
Check out the first video on this landowners property here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kTo8tzw6Fo
2nd Video showing us entering the spring cave for the first time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y89_BOhLZRc
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