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
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
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
This post contains links to two trip reports and a collection of photos. The trip reports are from Bob Lerch and Chad McCain. This was Chad’s very first trip in Carroll Cave, and his report has some first-timer impressions.
Participants: Rita Worden Bill Gee Kayla Heady Charles Heady Alexander Heady David Heady
Rita Worden’s trip report
Many thanks to Kayla Heady and her crew for their help planting the little baby trees at the Pic Walenta Memorial Campground at Carroll Cave! The planting was easy enough, but the camping, campfire-ing, sleeping(what sleeping?) and just plain thinking were challenging due to near gale force winds the entire time. With Bill Gee’s help we planted 11 bald cypress near the frog pond, 25 red cedars for a wind break (ohh yeah) and 10 white oaks for shade. We also did some collective thinking-out-loud as to the location for the pavilion. After we left Bill mowed around the cedars and I returned w/ tomato cages for the oaks and some Deer-Off to discourage browsing by our Long Horn friends. I hope it works and will be returning on Friday to check on it all.read more
Dedicated to the study, conservation and preservation of the Carroll Cave watershed.
