Reflection of an Endless Project
By: Brian K Alger
March 20, 2010
On the first Tuesday of November 1995, I became an official member of the Lubbock Area Grotto. This was the start of an incredible hobby that has allowed me to experience things in this world seen by so few individuals. One of the first projects I became involved with was the surveying of Endless Cave in Eddy County, New Mexico.
Early in 1995 the grotto took on this task offered by the Bureau of Land Management’s Carlsbad Field Office. The cave is only open from October 15 through April 15. During the summer a small bat population makes the cave their home. The grotto scheduled a survey trip to the cave on odd numbered months. A trip usually consisted of a full day of work in Endless on Saturday followed by a recreational trip to a different cave on Sunday. Many cavers from Texas and New Mexico attended the trips at first, which allowed for the creation of up to four teams in a single weekend. The grotto’s first trip to Endless took place on January 28, 1995.
My first trip to the cave was on January 27, 1996. Susan McCarty, who two years later would become my wife, and Chris Kennedy drove together. We followed Mike Hill, also from Lubbock, to McKittrick hill. Upon arrival, we met everyone and broke up into teams. Chris went with a team of cavers from New Mexico while Susan and I joined up with Noble Stidham and Gina Lee. Susan and Gina read instruments and I sketched for the first time while Noble was teaching us what to do. We worked in the upper maze area where the crawly maze looked the same no matter which way you looked. We all struggled as it was our first “in cave” survey experience. Unfortunately, the survey data we collected was bad and my sketch was worse. The result was a hoop shot into the round file.
The survey data was originally entered into a cave mapping program named SMAPS. It was a shareware MSDOS based program written by Speleotechnologies. The program came out in the early 1980’s. One feature that it allowed was an “Instrument Above Station” and a “Light Above Station” value for each shot. That is about all that I remember regarding it.
At first, I was not involved with the data crunching. I believe Noble was entering the data and keeping all the survey notes. Then, a new grotto member named Fred Koch began maintaining the data. I talked with him off and on about the data and the program. He did not stay in Lubbock for very long and moved down south after a couple of years.
After his departure, I asked Noble about the data. We talked about a newer program that was catching on in the cave mapping arena called Compass. This program was a MS Windows based program that included better loop troubleshooting tools and graphical line plot capabilities. I downloaded the software package and imported the data from SMAPS for evaluation. We liked it enough, that the grotto bought a registered copy shortly thereafter.
At that time, there were few loops in the cave as the original plan was to survey a “backbone” through the entire cave. The idea was that multiple teams could work from this “backbone” anywhere in the cave. This would allow many teams to work in different areas of the cave at the same time.
During the 1997-1999 timeframe, Greg McCarty, Chris and I all worked a compressed work week. Our work schedule was 3 twelve hours days followed by three days off and then 4 twelve hour days followed by four days off. Susan was a manager at Office Depot at the time. When she made the work schedule for the store, she was able to make her schedule mesh with ours. The result allowed us to travel to Carlsbad frequently to work in the cave.
The trips we made during this timeframe started out with survey work in the northeastern area of the Upper Maze. This portion of the cave consisted of a bunch of dead end crawls that averaged about two feet tall and two feet wide. Once completed, we then made the connection from the Little Expressway into the Upper Maze. The data was entered into Compass which revealed a closure error of 20 vertical feet. This was definitely not good. To correct this problem, we first resurveyed the main room in the Upper Maze. All this data turned out to be good. We then resurveyed from the “Y” to the duck under into the Lower Maze. No significant issues were found there either. I analyzed the loops until I was blue in the face, but could not identify any significant problems. We then resurveyed a line through the Lower Maze from the Little Expressway to the Canyon. This did reduce the elevation error to 12 feet. From there, we surveyed a couple of other loops to see what would happen. All of the loops closed with significant elevation errors. At this point, we were faced with a couple of options. The first was to throw out most of the existing data and start over, or figure out what the problem was. We opted to try and figure out what was wrong.
In 1999, the surveying stopped while the data was being analyzed. After a lot of trial and error, it was discovered that the problem was related to the “Instrument Above Station” or “Light Above Station” adjustments allowed by SMAPS. I created a MS Excel worksheet that allowed me to enter distance, elevation, instrument above station and light above station for a given shot. It output an adjusted inclination as Compass did not have a way to enter this data. I got the original survey notes and went through each and every shot. Adjustments were made to the compass data with positive results. The 12 foot closure error vanished.
This was now good news. However, work in the cave did not resume right away. The grotto went through a shift in membership. Some of the original members moved away, others quit caving, and some personal issues surfaced. This basically halted the project.
In 2001 I went back to school to acquire my Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology. My free time all but vanished. I was approached a couple of times to do some work on the project but time just didn’t permit it. Eventually, I did manage to squeeze in two trips in 2003 and one in 2004. These trips accomplished just enough to reveal more elevation related closure problems. 2005 went by without a single trip.
In 2006, with the help of some new members and some “old timers”, the project was resurrected. The way events rolled out, I found myself in the position of project leader in this new era of the Endless Cave survey project. Work first picked back up in the Lower Maze. A portion of the Lower Maze that had been previously surveyed was scrapped and resurvey of the entire Lower Maze commenced. This corrected the remaining elevation problems that turned up in 2004. From there, mop-up work was done throughout the cave.
Throughout 2008 and 2009, I constantly told the grotto we had just one more trip to finish the survey work. Each time we went in the cave, we found something else that needed to be done. Finally, in January of 2010, I could confidently say, just one more trip. That trip took place on March 20 where we went though the entire cave, except Sangre, and drew cross sections and checked the validity of the new map.
A few highlights I got to experience over the years in the cave:
- Shown the Commode formation in the Lower Maze.
- Examined the signatures in the Signature Room.
- Shown the War Club Room.
- Added the Eastern Maze to the survey.
- Added the Middle Eastern Maze to the survey.
- Greg and I came across the mother of all human turds in the Upper Maze. It was left by a group of individuals that were in the cave the weekend before our trip. I think Jim Goodbar used a backhoe to get it out.
- I once found several pieces of flagging tape laying around in the lower maze and picked them up. Unknown to me, Lee Ann Dean was leaving them behind as a means to find her way out of the lower maze that day.
- Susan nearly got bitten by an enormous rattle snake near the entrance to the Eastern Maze. She passed by the snake three times before it let her know where he was.
- Got trapped for many hours in the Eastern Maze after a single thunder storm flooded the passage we needed to go through to get out of the cave.
- Found a live Whip Snake in the Expressway.
- Found the most incredible helictite/column combination formation.
- Found a six drill holes in the cave.
- Found a complete skeleton of a rodent encapsulated in the flowstone on the floor in the Green Lake Maze.
- Came across the Easy Chair formation in the Easy Chair Maze.
While this project took much more time than it should have, it has been an incredible learning adventure. It has taught some “dos” and “do nots” of surveying, built a close camaraderie between grotto members, and resulted in an updated map of Endless Cave.
