I write this little story so that new folks who come through here won't share a similar disappointment. More experienced folks will certainly at least get a smile from this as I'm sure I'm not the only one(I hope) that this has ever happened to. Two weeks ago my daughter and I went ridgewalking in a favorite area in hopes of finding a third entrance to a breakdown blocked cave, on the other side of the breakdown of course. I started at the main entrance and traced the route of the cave on the surface. This area is a low plain riddled with small sinks with no obvious drainage at the bottoms. We soon started noticing a series of depressions and sinks along the general known route of the passages and located the second entrance which is near the breakdown blockage in the cave. Continuing on the surface we kept following the depressions and sinks as they became shallower but more numerous until we found one that had the look of a toilet drain. The hole was approxiamtely two feet in diameter inside of a sink that was 5 feet deep and 8 feet in wide. The "drain" portion of the hole went straight down about 4 feet and appeared to have the start of horizontal passage that was 2 feet wide and 2 feet high with a very clean bottom. I became excited. Continuing on the surface, the chain of sinks kept going towards a 100 foot sandstone bluff. As we made our way we came upon a very small sink in what had become a valley. This sink had a hole around 10 inches in diameter at the bottom and oddly had the look of fresh dirt around it. It did not appear to be animal dug but had an erroded look to it. Most people would've blown it off but I said what the hey and bent down to take a look. I saw no bottom. Now unfortunately caves weren't moving any noticeable air that day so I figured I'd whip out my light and illuminate just a very shallow washed out dirt hole. I turned on the light and saw no bottom. I moved my head a little closer to allow my eyes to adjust and my jaw dropped. The little 10 inch dirt hole belled out to around 4 to 6 feet wide with limestone walls and was 8 to 10 feet deep. It had apparent horizontal passage with a pebblely bottom that was creekbed in appearance. I became ectastic and scared at the same time as I was in the bottom of a sink that had only inches of dirt between my feet and a decent drop should it decide to give way. So I immediately climbed out.
Now I must give a little background before continuing. The cave we were searching for an entrance for is a few thousand feet in length with walking and a little swimming passage. It moves a LOT of water for this area as well as a lot of air through the breakdown at the end. While I'm sure its no Tumbling Rock or even Limrock, the little hole I found surely revealed virgin passage and we were quite a ways from the known stop but still along a series of sinks and depressions that connected where we were with the known plugged passage.
Back to the story. I eased out of the small sink and took my gps from my daughter to record the spot. I hit "mark" and got the message that my waypoints were full. I had no pen and paper and for a moment was disappointed but I looked down and said "its ok, we're loggin the track and all we have to do when we come back is follow our footsteps". I looked at my topo in hand, looked at a couple of landmarks and grinning from ear to ear told my girl "lets go and see what else we can find". We hiked to around 6 more entrances to other caves, found a freshly dropped Mossy Oak cap then hiked another 3 miles meandering back to our vehicle to hastily drive home and plan our return. Upon return to the vehicle I went to turn off the GPS and noticed it had powered down already. I assumed it was the batteries so I swapped them and powered back up to make some notes on our track on the topo map. Bad news, apparently either something malfunctioned or I hit the power button unknowingly because the track information was not there. My little Magellan does not save info unless it gos though its power down sequence so the location info I thought I had was lost. Still, I thought I'd remember where we were by the land marks. Well, I found out today, 2 weeks later, that neither I nor my daughter took good enough notice to our surroundings. 4 miles and 3 and a half hours of hiking and we still did not find our little hole. I'm upset to say the least but will continue the search next weekend.
I've always used an inexpensive GPS which has served me well for a number of years. Today I learned many things about ridgewalking. Carry a camera, always have pen and paper and don't skimp on a gps as you can never have enough space for waypoints.