Cave Research Foundation
Western Operations
Sequoia / Kings Canyon National Park
Lilburn Cave and Mineral King
Minutes of the Organizational Meeting
2026 CRF SEKI Organizational Meeting
University of California Riverside. Riverside, CA
January 25, 2026
Call to Order
The meeting was called to order at 13:10 hrs.
Welcome
This year ahead will be an exciting one, we have multiple new projects coming onboard (we’ll talk about them later during the meeting!), and we are extremely excite about the opportunities that these bring to the group. Thank you for all your hard work and for your commitment to the project. Truly, thank you.
Introductions
We had 13 people in attendance. Of those, 4 were in person at UCR campus, 9 joined via teleconference (using the Zoom platform). We had a round of quick introductions to share how we joined the Cave Research Foundation (CRF) and what are our interests.
Overview of CRF Board of Directors (BoD) Meeting
There’s up to $18,000 available each year for grad student research grants (up from $15,000), last year all of it was used. Each grant is usually $1000-$2500.
There’s a new fund, the Osburn fund (named after Bob Osburn, chief cartographer for Mammoth for many, many years), this will give grants for any aspect of mapping.
Reports for the different projects:
Hamilton Valley (headquarters of CRF): Utility bills went really high, they were renting the space to Kentucky Fish and Wildlife, and they were not careful with water or lights, they won’t renew the contract with them. There’s an expanded parking lot and faster Wi-Fi, cavers can stay there for $15/night ($14/night if joining an expedition). Cave Books took a dip in sales with the government shutdown, since parks are their biggest customers.
Northwest Ops: CRF has been active in Lava Beds since 1989, it became a separate CRF project in 2019. It encompasses three areas: Klamath National Forest (Joel Despain, Heather Veerkamp and Niles Lathrop are project managers), Craters of the Moon (CROM, Mark Jones is project manager), and Lava Beds National Monument (LABE, John Tinsley is the project manager, but in a few years he’ll be replaced by Steve Hathaway, from Portland). Klamath has been active with new caves and maps. LABE has been adding to survey in multiple caves. Craters had 2 expeditions with a total of about 3 miles of passage mapped. The interesting thing is that they had a group of volunteers that were walking on the surface and marking in a GPS all the entrances that they found, and then cavers would go and survey the cave. Cave maps were being turned around very quickly to show the volunteers what they found. Klamath mountain kept working on Scorpion Cave, it may reach over a mile in length, and they had a digging project and ridgewalked some harsh terrain. Lava Beds had two expeditions and a field trip with the interns working for resource management at the monument. Interestingly, at Lava Beds the monument uses numbers for the caves, not names (same in Craters of the Moon and in Mammoth).
Eastern Ops: They had 10 expeditions. The one thing to note was that they had significant rain and they had the third highest on record flooding in the cave, and some passages are still underwater. Park employees taking early retirement or being asked to leave their jobs has made it challenging to restart some older projects. There was an interesting discussion about cave passages going under private property. Similar to air rights above your land, you can’t prevent jets from flying over, but if someone has a drone and is taking pictures of you that’s very different. A passage of a non-commercial cave, not extracting minerals, that goes under private land is totally OK. If the entrance is on the land, that’s different, and if the owner were to be bothered by explosions in the passage, etc, that’s different. There was the case that a landowner wanted cavers to pay him a fee for going under his land, a judge threw this out. The exact words of the law are different in every state, but it can be something similar to this in most states. It is still a good practice to talk to landowners when cave passages go under their land. And finally, this was the only project with membership fees, they were finally eliminated.
Ozarks: There was mostly discussion regarding expired agreements with agencies who oversee the area. They work closely with the state government and receive money from them for their projects, like doing cave survey before widening of highways. The money is used, for example, to improve bat habitats in other locations when caves or trees are affected by constructions projects (for example, removal of commercial infrastructure in an abandoned commercial cave, to make it better for bats). They also do a lot of bat-friendly cave gating. In Arkansas they’re adding some cave learning modules for K-12 levels.
Southwest Ops: At Carlsbad they can’t do any pool restoration anymore, only lint pickup and cleaning algae. There is a new cave specialist at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Hunter Kline (he came to Lilburn a couple times). Lee Ann Dean took over as project coordinator, replacing Janice Tucker. Hunter Kline didn’t know of many projects from the past that need to be restarted, so there’s not a lot of onboarding or communication between cave specialists when they take over (this happens in most parks, not just at CAVE). Interestingly, the park doesn’t recognize the work at Carlsbad as a CRF project, they are working as park volunteers. They may try to change this.
Galapagos Project: Aaron Addison and Elizabeth Winkler are coleads. Work has been happening for 10 years. They have surveyed 50 new caves. No update on this for this past meeting.
General discussion:
There may be revised JV forms, specifying that data can’t be shared without the approval from the project managers.
And a reminder that all JVs can give us suggestions of topics to bring to the board meeting, and at the annual meeting there is a general meeting, open to all JVs, you can attend that one if you’re interested in hearing all about the bylaws and other minutia about the CRF.
Andy Armstrong replaced Pat Seisser as the government liaison between the National Cave and Karst Research Institute (NCKRI) and the parks. Ben Tobin is the head of NCKRI, they’re both cavers.
The CRF now has a Compliance Officer position.
The new annual report is being held back because of the three parks/monuments that require cave numbers instead of names (this has direct effects on maps, reports, lists of long/deep caves, etc). It will be published with numbers, no names unless it’s a widely known cave/name.
There is a new website for the CRF.
We have a new agreement in place with the NPS, good until April 9, 2030. Some areas have agreements with their respective parks/monuments, at SEKI we only have the research proposals, and it’s been working well for us, we’ll leave it like this.
Fellows and Certificates of Merit were nominated and voted on.
This year’s board of directors (BoD) meeting will be held In Perryville, AR in early November 2026.
News from NPS and SEKI
The main announcement is that Danny Boiano, the Physical and Wildlife Sciences Branch Lead - Aquatic Ecologist • Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks took early retirement, so our main liaison now is Trey Brink, physical scientist (he reported to Danny Boiano). One of his main areas of focus is air quality assessments (a job that he was already doing in Yosemite before accepting the position in SEKI), but he’s going to oversee all physical science aspects.
Thanks to Natasha we returned to Mineral King, we found that Memorial Day is too early to go to the high elevations.
We also found out that we had not Mineral King spelled out in our permits, it will be added.
The undergrowth in the canyon has been impressive. Since there is no tree canopy to control the growth of bushes (some of them thorny) and they are all competing for space several areas in the park are overgrown with bushes. This directly affects us at Lilburn, after the Redwood Creek crossing sometimes following the trail is challenging. The trail crew has not been working in the canyon because it’s closed to the public, they won’t be cleaning the trail just for us. On the bright side, this should help control the soil to prevent as much silt and soil deposition in sinkholes as we have been noticing recently. We’ll find out in the first trip of the year, to see how badly we need to dig out the Historic Entrance to Lilburn.
On good news, we have confirmation rom the wilderness office that because the canyon is closed to the public, we don’t need to request a wilderness permit, our research permit works as a wilderness permit in this particular case.
The ladder at the Historic Entrance is too short now, the base on which it sits has lowered due to water erosion.
Most of the cavers in the project are post-cabin, for most of y’all going to Lilburn means backpacking, it doesn’t bring memories of hanging out at the cabin and reminiscing when we could do the hike with just a day pack since most of our gear was at the cabin.
SEKI Operations Overview
For 2025 we planned 11 trips and 6 happened. 31 cavers participated this year. Of these, 12 were existing JVs, 10 were new JVs.
We donated 1505 hours of volunteer work to the park (equivalent to 62.7 person-days donated to the park). This gives an average of 251 hours per trip.
We spent 113 person-hours underground, and 315.3 person-hours on project-related surface work. A huge shift from past years to surface work, since we had the Mineral King trips in support of Natasha’s paleoclimate project and Felipe’s ridgewalking trips.
We spent 0 hours on maintenance this year.
It was a good year for water availability, so there was no time spent collecting water.
We spent 1076.7 person-hours in non-project activities, like sleeping and eating.
Project Review
Cartography and inventory at Lilburn
There was no survey at Lilburn this past year, so the cave length remains at 22.25 miles. The focus in the last trips has been on cave inventory, especially after the fire and flooding, to find out what changes, if any, happened in the cave.
Paleoclimate
Natasha (Principal Investigator for the paleoclimate research project) needs for her project caves that are close to the surface to detect changes in the chemistry through precipitation, but not so close that rain water would just drip into the cave immediately (in this way extremes in rain and drought are softened in the data). In 2025 we went to several caves in Mineral King that we thought would be good candidates for this.
We will also take a look at Crystal Cave for her paleoclimate project, Ben Tobin has a couple other ideas for caves in that area that could work
Mineral King
We had two trips to Mineral King. Unfortunately the caves at Mineral King turned out to not be great for the paleoclimate. We didn’t find any caves with active dripping. Also, Mineral King has an access problem, in that the higher elevation caves can only be accessed for a couple of months in the year and it’s a challenging hike.
Hurricane Crawl:
The park rejected a research proposal for the Hurricane Crawl resurvey and inventory. Their argument is that the cave is too delicate and what they have is “good enough”. We may try again, focusing on the biological inventory.
Ursa Minor:
We are working on a project for Ursa Minor. With the Hurricane Crawl precedent, we will focus more on finding out the extent of the cave to prevent construction or structures above to affect the cave. This has precedent in Wind Cave (South Dakota) and Carlsbad (New Mexico).
Ridgewalking:
Felipe is using a program that he wrote to analyze the lidar scans of the park to identify possible karst features of interest. He then picks and area and locates them on the ground. In a wilderness you are allowed to go anywhere you want (of course, as long as you are not causing permanent damage), but to facilitate information sharing and discussion he applied for a permit. So far he has conducted two ridgewalking trips, and as with the situation of the trail to Lilburn after the Redwood Creek crossing, sometimes the overgrown bushes make moving through the terrain to locate the karst features challenging. But this is an extremely promising project.
General discussion:
In 2024 Whitney Potter built a lidar scanner himself, the lidar module is about $300, and he designed the controller circuit board. He’s working on releasing it as an open source project once it’s up to his standards. It saves the data in the cloud, basically the output is a text file with all the XYZ points (this is the standard for lidar), and there’s open source software that reads the data to generate a 3D model. Whitney gave us an update on his lidar unit, he has successfully tried it in caves. It takes the same amount of time to scan a passage as walking it, there’s no need to set stations and let the lidar scan for a predetermined time. The scan could then be transformed into a plan and profile by using another software (or maybe in the future we will get used to seeing cave maps as 3D maps, in screens so that we can rotate them or move through them.
Fund Status
Our annual expenses are around $150, mostly due to the printing of the CRF Newsletter that’s sent as a hard copies to the park, this comes out of the Lilburn fund. The Garvey fund saw an increase due to interest of about $390.
We have $1134 in the general fund and $8068 in the Garvey fund.
Expedition Schedule for 2026
January
25: 13:00 hrs, CRF West Planning Meeting. Riverside, CA
February
No trip scheduled
March
13 - 15: CRF Ridgewalking (Felipe Roz Barscevicius)
April
3 -5: CRF Ridgewalking (Felipe Roz Barscevicius)
May
1 - 3: CRF Lilburn trail work (Roger Mortimer)
22: First day of quota season at SEKI
22 - 25 (Memorial Day): CRF Mineral King (Fofo Gonzalez)
June
12 - 14: CRF Lilburn (Fofo Gonzalez)
July
24 - 26: CRF Lilburn (Lynne Jesaitis, Charlie Hotz)
August
14 - 16: CRF Lilburn or Mineral King (TBD) (Dav Angel)
September
4 - 7 Sep (Labor Day): CRF Mineral King (Fofo Gonzalez)
25 - 27: CRF Lilburn (Boof Truchan, Felipe Roz Barscevicius)
26: Last day of quota season at SEKI
October
16 - 18: CRF Lilburn (Lynne Jesaitis, Charlie Hotz)
November
TBD: CRF Board of Directors Meeting. Perryville, AR.
6 - 8: CRF Lilburn (Boof Truchan, Felipe Roz Barscevicius)
December
No trips scheduled
January 2027
24: 13:00 hrs CRF West Planning Meeting. Location TBD
Meeting Adjourned
The meeting was adjourned at 14:21 hrs. Some people stayed online to reminisce about times past.
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