Biology

2021-07-12 Guano Pile Check

Guano pile quick check

Participants – Bill Gee
Rita Worden
Seth Colston

Time in – 8:00am, Time out 11:00am

For many years we have assumed that Carroll Cave was a summer host to a maternity colony of grey bats. The bats use several guano piles located in Carroll Passage upstream from the Lunch Room. We have done trips through there in October for about 15 years. The guano gauges always show signs of use at sometime in the previous year. We have never had any more accurate idea of when the bats are roosting over the guano piles. read more

Biology, Rescue Training

2021-07-11 Upstream Thunder River to Mapped End

Participants – Bill Gee
Seth Colston
John Roth
Martin Carmichael
Hou Zhong
Rita Worden

Time in 9:15am, Time out 5:20pm

The weather situation for this trip was very dicey. We did not know what we were going to do until we got into the cave. The forecast for the night before the trip was for 1 to 2 inches of rain. Some rain did fall, but it was only 0.15 inches which is not enough to seriously affect the stream level. The daytime forecast called for showers after lunch. A shower did indeed happen, but less than 0.10 inch. read more

Hydrology

2021-07-10 Data Logger Service Trip

Participants – Bill Gee
George Tengel
Shawn Paxton
Rebecca Carpenter
Josh Hutchinson
Kent Melchiors

Time in 9:15am, Time out 3:45pm

This is the annual summer trip to download data from all of the data loggers in the cave. The loggers only hold about 7 months of data, so we visit them every 6 months or so.

I drove to the silo campground Friday afternoon, arriving about 4:00pm. After parking the camper, I started the lawn mower. The grass was not all that high except right nround the camper. I mowed in front of the silo, around the picnic table and around my camper and truck. I also ran a string trimmer. My string trimmer is a small battery-powered device that just does not have the power to deal with tall grass such as what is under the picnic table. read more