Chads93GT wrote:If you survey it you can name it. I you simply find it but not map it. Be prepared for a name change.
Sure you can, but why? I appreciate the history of caving and cave names too much to rename simply because the early explorers did their caving before surveyors became so high minded. People and communities give things names, and they probably don't know that their right to name caves is dependent on their ability or willingness or desire to survey. If there is a practical reason to put a new name out there, like one of the ones I mentioned earlier, I understand. Otherwise, I like to preserve old names.
It seems the name switch method of hiding a find can be effective. I searched old literature, the internet, sent emails, made phone calls, knocked on doors, chatted in gas stations and made an all around nuisance of myself for months in search of a couple of caves I was interested in, only to find out later that I already had the coordinates. The incomplete descriptions of caves in old books helps make them hard to recognize too. Holsinger, for example describes one cave as a "fairly large dry passage that extends for 250 feet to a 30 foot, dead end pit." I wouldn't have sought out that cave based on this description, but found it by talking to neighbors before I read the book. There are hundreds of feet of large stream passage and numerous high leads at the bottom of this "dead end pit." I couldn't find any old station markers, but there were two old sets of footprints in the clay banks. If I survey this cave, I'm not going to feel any need to rename it. I'm no better than whoever was there first, or the guy who looked down the pit 40 or 50 or 70 years ago and decided that it was a dead end, or the folks who lived around there and never set foot in the cave but named it after the farmer who owned it.