text and photos by Jacqui Thomas

PBSS members Kerry Lowery and Jacqui Thomas [report] were joined by Dallas area cavers Charles Goldsmith, Cristina Estrada, and Ryan Monjaras. All arrived at varying times of Friday evening and worked Saturday until about 1700

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All were packed up and gone by 1800 Saturday.

When I went to the cave the Wednesday afternoon before the dig, the floor was sticky mud, reminiscent of chocolate pudding. I left the cave with boot soles two inches thicker than when I went in. I also spoke with Dr. Fields and we figured it would be dried out enough to dig, even if we had the bit more rain forecast for that night. Our buckets were lying where the foot of water left them but the saw horses, sifting screen and light were all unaffected. (As was the big pile of tailings we had left from the last time).

Friday night offered some mist and rain spits and a brilliant light show on over 180 degrees of horizon, as we sat on the northern edge of a storm travelling from southwest to northeast through Rocksprings and Junction. I guess my wisdom (surely not age) overcame my enjoyment of lightning watching as I opted for retiring while Kerry watched from the rise with the cave entrances. We had a negligible amount of rain during the night.

The Dallas contingent arrived in the night.

Saturday morning Kerry rode with Dr. Fields to get the Bobcat. Our first order of business was to collect buckets and sift and remove the existing dirt pile and haul out the broken rocks also left from last time. Sifting turned up no interesting objects. We filled a couple of Bobcat buckets just with the loose stuff. (I have looked up bucket capacities and looks like a level bucketful is just over a yard of material—1.3 cf—so we moved 10.8 cf).After we hoisted those buckets we moved the pipe frame to the smaller entrance closer to where we were digging.  We decided to concentrate on our original direction, as the shelf of collapse and dirt continues in to fairly rock-free soil, where everywhere else we had tried was compressed small cobbles and dirt. As we peeled back the ledge and cleaned out and widened our trench we continued to dig carefully and inspect all tailings for spear points, bones, and other items of interest.  Christina found a small snake that Ryan brought out for identification.  Dr. Fields thought its presence in the cave was intentional so it was returned.

[Thanks to Bill Bentley’s research the snake has been identified as most likely a Texas Blind Snake. He/she is meant to be there and what we found is adult-sized].

We found no points. We found one large flake of chert, a mystery incisor-looking small tooth, a couple of large bones, and a large brown tooth that looks like the cat tooth we found on an earlier dig. All but the cat tooth were found while peeling back the ledge.

We were visited by Jeryl Fields and her neighbor Tami Love, who is a science person and a teacher at the Middle School. We were able to persuade her to come down and look around, mostly by promising we could get her out again if her knee acted up.

Fortunately we did not have to make good on our promise.

We were disappointed that we did not find anything of significance but we were quite pleased to have cleaned up the site and made some progress. We are also excited by the prospect of another trip soon, led by Charles. There is an archaeology student who may be able to join the next dig, and we will have contact information for the caver that Jeryl met in Arlington before we started the dig.  She also expressed interest.  The Fields’ met a San Antonio caver at the latest Rock Art Foundation trip and he also is interested in joining us. Looks like we will have enough people to make significant progress into the cave.

We are already talking about another dig the first Saturday in June (the 5th). It will be led by Charles Goldsmith and hopefully will be a large and productive group including some PBSSers and the archaeology person from Dallas.

Cat Tooth

Ryan Digging

Cristina digging in the trench

Kerry and the Rock

The hard part: Ryan

The hard part: Cristina

Kerry and the Bobcat