Lost River - Karst Information Portal

2007 NSS Convention Guidebook
Strunk to map the cave, according to Kent
Wilson of the Bloomington Indiana Grotto.
Strunk’s map was never completed either.
Published History
The cave has an extensive published
history. The cave was featured in The News,
February 1955, Vol. 13 No. 2. The News was
the name of the National Speleological Society
newsletter at the time. The front cover of that
issue featured a picture taken inside the cave
with a young boy (Robert Bruce) sitting on a
ledge over the stream. The author, Dick Bruce,
(his dad) wrote that the cave was a 300-yard
walking passage to a 4-foot-high passage that
he said went for a mile to a terminal breakdown
room. Who knows, maybe he meant 100 feet
instead of a mile and it was typed in wrong or
mis-corrected in editing. If that were true his
estimate wouldn’t be so bad. He also described
the entrance as being 15 feet wide and 6 feet
high. The actual dimensions are 600 feet of
walking passage followed by 100 feet of 4foot-high
passage to the terminal breakdown.
The entrance is 25 feet wide and 10 to 12 feet
high. Bruce also pointed out that Powell was
originally generous to cavers and built a cabin
by the entrance and rented it to interested
people for five dollars a weekend.
The cave was also featured in Richard
Powell’s 1961 book, Caves of Indiana, on page
104. Powell’s book was the first real cave list
published in Indiana and could be obtained
at any bookstore. Legal descriptions were
used for locations in place of road directions
and the book was not projected at the general
public, but at cavers and scientists, so it never
really caught on as a caving manual for the
inexperienced. Powell gave reference to the
article being from a CIG Newsletter in 1957.
If one were to look through the CIG index,
they won’t find a listing of Boone Cave in
Owen County. They will find one for Boones
Mill Cave in Crawford County, though. Keller
of the Bloomington Indiana Grotto drafted
both maps and the Boone Cave map actually
debuted in Powell’s book and is not in any CIG
Newsletter.
412
Other small articles also fill the NSS file,
some are dated and others are not. Most tend
to give a brief description of the cave. One
letter from July 19, 1954, from Ray Streib (NSS
2128) to someone named Burton outlined a
virgin discovery. I think the discovery was the
side passage complex in the Entrance Room.
The picture provided doesn’t really match
that area, though. The map in Powell’s book
is similar to mine and doesn’t have anything
on it I missed. That map came ten years after
the alleged discovery. Streib also described the
terminal breakdown room with more detail
than Bruce and said it was about 700 yards in
from the entrance. More than twice as long as
Bruce’s borehole estimation, but not the almost
mile and a half total estimation by Bruce. Streib
and his group went to the cave in hopes of
penetrating the terminal breakdown. Rushing
water that could be heard through the rocks and
strong airflow from beyond motivated them.
The dig was unsuccessful and the breakdown
was not penetrated until closer to 1985 when
Jerry Bailey begins the ascent of the Climb-down
Entrance. Photo by Rob Jarboe.