Chuck Sutherland

The dashboard below is dynamic, and part of a larger tracking system I've created to allow me to organize my caving trips. Within the ESRI's Survey123 framework, I include date, who I was with, and links to external references like Flickr, or Facebook, and other data. Many old time cavers have journals, this is the same practice, modernized with some benefits and some losses. I provide this data publicly to encourage other cavers to better catalog their own trips, provide myself with a better mechanism to track my own caving activies, and to grow my ArcGIS Online skills. View the dashboard fullscreen .

As any conservation minded individual will tell you, having a cave location be public knowledge is usually a recipe for disaster. It's a very well documented phenomena that people break cave formations, vandalize caves with spray paint and other mediums, and leave gross amounts of trash behind. Even well meaning hikers and outdoors people may not realize the nuance of landowner relations and by accessing private property may upset relationships that cavers have worked hard to develop so that we may have access to caves. The proliferation of geodata in many accessible forms is eroding the secrecy that the caving community has long used to protect underground resources. Here's a guide with suggestions on how one can protect these sensitive places from occuring on Internet. Jump to... Google Maps OSM - Open Street Map Google Maps The first thing to realize about Google maps is that deleting a feature is nearly impossible. It's possible to "take ownership...

Throughout a caver's career, certain caves stand out as important, or defining to them. Unnamed Cave 61 is the cave that stands out for me (the cave does have a name, but in the convention of archaeological sites, we do not share its name). I was present when the discovery of its prehistoric art was first made. I initially brought cavers there on a lead by a neighbor. We believed that we were the first to have documented the cave, but later learned that it had been previously described, but the location was wrong. I corrected the error and merged the records within the Tennessee Cave Survey dataset. This cave I have come to think of as "mine" though I in no way own or have any particular claim to it. All that serves to preface my walkthrough of the cave, and its amazing contents. In this first image of the panel, one can see it naturally. It was photographed with painted light from a headlamp by a tripod mounted camera at close...

For approximately the last year I have been working with a small team of cavers to document and map a new cave find in Tennessee. Despite only having mapped six miles of cave passage, we have found that the cave is absurdly enormous in terms of volume. The geology and formations of the cave are so massive as to be confusing. Not to be overdramatic, but the mechanisms of it's development call into question much of what we understand about cave development in general. In other words, this one is a game changer. Among its many discoveries is a river system on par with that of the Cumberland River. A breakdown crawl at the entrance, followed by a nearly vertical scramble on breakdown of about 180' brings you to the gigantic river passage. The mostly phreatic borehole here runs for most of the mapped length of the cave as a network of braided passage varying in height between 20' - 140' in some places. Familiar, but bizarrely huge formations peak down on us from galleri...