The Southeastern Cave Conservancy works to protect these underground spaces—and the critters that live there.
Wm Shrewsbury
It’s been more than three decades since 14 outdoor enthusiasts launched a nonprofit so they could take ownership of a 3-mile-long cave donated by a Northwest Georgia landowner. Before long, the focus of the newly formed Southeastern Cave Conservancy Inc. had mushroomed into something much more.
Ron Miller
Caves offer lures both at the surface entrance and below the openings, but visitors need to keep in mind the sensitive nature and aspects of both the caves and their inhabitants.
Kris Green, one of the original co-founders, remembers it well. “The group said, ‘Well, we need to create an organization that can provide for recreational opportunity as well as conservation and have an arm that would provide education so that people would understand why caves and the critters in the caves are important and need to be saved.”
Today, SCCi is billed as the largest land conservancy in the world solely dedicated to caves and karsts, the surrounding, water-carved limestone landscapes. Based in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, the organization now manages more than 170 caves in 35 preserves in seven states, owning most of them outright and partnering with landowners, government agencies and other nonprofit groups to safeguard others. Trained scientists oversee research projects, and volunteers closely monitor the caves in an effort to thwart vandalism, poaching and the spread of invasive plant species. Free permits are required to visit any of the SCCi preserves.
According to the organization, the Southeast is home to thousands of caves, many of which have been harmed by development or misuse. A top priority is protecting the natural inhabitants, including blind cave fish, salamanders in Tennessee and Virginia, and imperiled Indiana bats, found mostly in Kentucky. Great pains are taken to conserve the habitat of tens of thousands of endangered gray bats, which pollinate crops and gobble up high numbers of pests. Fricks Cave near Chickamauga, Georgia, for example, is only open to SCCi members and supporters one day a year, in the dead of winter.
Chris Halleen
“We don’t know why about 30 to 35 of the 5,000 [gray bats] that are there all summer stay, but they do,” says executive director Ray Knott. “We go in ahead of time and rope off where the bats are hibernating, and cavers are to be quiet in that section and not disturb them and not walk underneath them or shine lights upon them. We have other caves that have bats that are maternity colonies.”
Fricks Cave
One reason to care about these dark-loving creatures, Knott adds, is that, “a lot of these cave-dwelling species are kind of like the canary in the coal mine. If they start dying off, it starts affecting things well beyond where their habitat is. So we value all of them.”
SCCi also strives to preserve the region’s rich cave history, from prehistoric jaguar bones and Native American drawings to saltpeter mine ruins from the Civil War. The organization has, for example, worked to shield rare inscriptions written in the Cherokee syllabary on the walls at Howards Waterfall Cave Preserve, the first site donated to SCCi in 1991. Graffiti was starting to mar the writings by the time they were discovered.
Educating students and the general public is another priority for SCCi. So is striking a balance between protecting the caves and promoting safe use. Says Knott: “We don’t necessarily need more people visiting caves. But I was a Scout my whole life and our cave trips were something I remembered. So I think it is important that young people have the opportunity to visit these places … and understand why it’s important to save them.”
For more info, see SaveYourCaves.org.
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2023 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!