April 24, 2007 by Hubert.

You can use Google Earth to plot your favorite cave locations. I created a bit map symbol for caves (cave.bmp) “” and saved it in my C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth. If you have the coordinates for the caves you can easily plot them, assign a name and use the cave symbol to show the location on Google Earth. Of course you do not have to share them with the world, you can save as My Places.kml where ever you like and send them to other cavers.

You will need to convert the Lat Long to decimal to enter into Google Earth in the format: 34.123456, -85.67891. To convert the minutes to deg divide by 60, to convert the seconds to deg divide by 60 twice, then add the two together. For example 34 deg 20′ 45″ would convert 20/60=0.333333 plus 45/60/60=0.0125. 34+0.333333+0.0125=34.345833.

Google Earth will then zoom in on your cave location, click the Add Placemark pin and type in the name of the cave along with any comments that you want to be displayed. You can now zoom and angle your view for printing or just to study the cave locations

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April 21, 2007 by Hubert.

Just returned from the TCS, (Tennessee Cave Survey), meeting in Sewanee, Tennessee.  It was a good meeting followed by good fellowship at a nearby restaurant.  The presentation by Matt Niemiller on cave fish was interesting and sightly over my head.  The Talk on Nunley Cave and cave diving was very interesting and I also learned a little bit about bolting, although I am mostly a horizontal caver.  It was great to see some old friends again, I have missed the last couple of meetings due to health issues and am now looking forward to doing a little more caving.

Tennessee now has over 9,000 known caves and the goal is to have a tag stating “Land of 10,000 Caves”.  The TCS added 115 new caves last year to their survey. I understand that a lot of new cave are being found in north central Tennessee near the Kentucky border, this appears to be a neglected part of the state with plenty of caves.  

Grassy Cove Saltpeter Cave During one of my discussions with some cavers form Knoxville, I heard that rabbit hole we discovered on March 18, 1972 had been sealed off.  I am not sure of the reason, they thought that it may be due to the heavy traffic in that area.  Click here to read about the March 18th discovery.

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