Chuck Sutherland

This was the end of the main trunk of Trash Compactor Cave and the room for which it is named (Trash Compactor scene: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope). All the debris you see here is floating on water. Notice as we move, how the whole mass ripples. It is through this sump that we suspect a connection to Capshaw. Lee Pearson and Jason Collard later went to the closest spot in Capshaw to see if there was any match to debris types and he found plenty of styrofoam. It's a primitive, but possible effective dye-trace. This cave was accessed after the May 2010 floods when a swallet finally enlarged enough to allow for human visitation.

During our sinkhole tour the night of 5/01/10 Jason Collard and I stopped at Warehouse sink. I expected to see the sinkhole filled with pooled up water the same as the last two sinkholes shown. However, this is what I saw instead. The water is rushing directly into the swallet of the sinkhole, and (based on my prior knowledge of the this streams morphology) I could see that the stream had downcut considerably. Three days later, after the flood waters had subsided, Jason Collard, Lee Pearson and I accessed Trash Compactor cave via this entrance. This entrance is likely only accessible intermittently. Stream cross-sections of the creek, collected by Dr. Evan Hart of TTU, shows the sink collecting silt and backing up, alternating with times of deep down-cutting within the silt. A few hypothesis could explain the cycle. It could be that a cave collapse unplugs the cave to accept more water and downcuts the silt making it the cave accessible. An alternative explanation could be ...

"It's not a saucer." - Gerald Moni I had been contacted by a landowner in Putnam County to check some caves on his property. I met with Gerald Moni, and the landowner's father, Roy P. Roy is an intelligent and likable guy, 72 years old, and in pretty great shape. We parked on a cul-de-sack and proceeded on foot. It was bitterly cold at 15 degrees, snowing, and windy, perhaps not the best day for a stroll in the woods. But since I work all the time, I take what I can get. Not far below where we parked was the Hartselle-Monteagle contact, and the features Roy wanted to show us were there. I slipped in the first, a 15 foot dud, but blowing lots of air through a hole about big enough for my cat. The other two were less impressive than that, but all blowing lots of steam. Gerald and I wanted to field check Determined Moonshiner, a nearby cave. We found it, and after taking pictures of the beautiful ice flow over the entrance, I kicked the ice out and went ...

Greetings and welcome! This page showcases a collection of my publications, activities, and accolades. As my interests are diverse, you may find web pages and self-published posts that are not readily categorized. Thank you for your curiosity in my work! Jump to Bio Media Use Guidelines Links and Affiliations Publications Bio Geographer, photographer, caver I am a professional geographer with expertise in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and data analysis. I currently serve as a GIS Analyst at the State of Tennessee Real Estate Asset Management (STREAM) Division of the Department of General Services, where I apply GIS technology to support data-driven decision-making. In addition, I am an adjunct professor at Tennessee Tech University , teaching Theory of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) I and II. I manage Tennessee Landforms , a website dedicated to documenting a...

On June 8th of 2008 in a torrent of rain, myself, Dr. Hugh Mills, and Quentin Jones ascended the mountain on which Breakdown Palace Cave is located. This was my third trip up these steep slopes. I hoped to entice someone, anyone to go into the cave with me as every previous trip ended up being solo. The entrance of Breakdown Palace was dug open in 1989 by Mike Rogers and Jack Thomison. It's a nasty climbdown that despite the narrative saying is 15', I remember as being 40' as a near vertical chimney. The chimney is the remains of a collapse feature which was shored up by the less than stable soil. It's sketchy. Hugh and Quentin watched me climb down into the entrance with a waterfall of chocolate milk flowing over me. They both shook their heads. I was going in alone, yet again. I had my first DSLR, a Pentex K10D, with me and I was hoping to get pictures there with scale of the massive formations. I snapped pictures with my on-camera flash of the massive room ...

On this trip, Anne Elmore and Bill Walters lead myself, Kristen Bobo, Greg King, Mike West, and members of the Sewanee Mountain Grotto into the N-trunk of Blue Spring Cave. At the time of the trip, this cave held the distinction of being Tennessee's largest and the 36th largest in the world. This was the first time I had seen the many delicate forms gypsum and other evaporites can assume in a pristine underground environment. Flowers, beards, fish scale, frosted flakes, snowballs, and needles adorning the passage for nearly a mile as we strolled deep below the surface. In other locations rugosa coral fossils sprang from the ceilings and walls with water worn weathering stripping the limestone from around them. It seemed unlike that anything could further "wow" me than the minerals and fossils mentioned above, but one last surprise lay in store: jaguar footprints from the Pleistocene epoch. The footprints of this massive cat, likely the species Panthera onca augusta, s...