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This cache is just off the trail that leads to Bower Cave, about 10 miles from Coulterville. This should be an easy drive for most vehicles with average clearance. If you want to enter Bower Cave you must first get a permit at the Groveland Ranger Station. The cache is not inside the gated area, so no permit is needed to find the cache.
You are looking for a painted ammo can that should not be difficult to find once you reach ground zero.
Bower Cave
A Journey from Private to Public Ownership
by Bruce Rogers and Pat Helton
Published: Spring, 2005
Bower Cave is one of the nearly forgotten caves of the Mother Lode. Long known to Native Americans, the cave has also had a convoluted history of use by Euro-Americans, and was the site of one of the first cave dives in the United States.
The cave consists of a collapse sinkhole in marble, nearly 100 feet in both diameter and depth, with a small pool at its bottom. Formerly, a "bower" of maple trees partly canopied this large roofless chamber. Several short, decorated passages can be reached by exciting climbs up the walls. An enormous submerged passage only accessible by cave diving leads over 800 feet into the hillside bordering the Merced River, dropping to at least 240 feet deep. The cave continues inward and downward, but to follow it would require extreme cave diving expertise.
The early human history of the Bower Cave area has been difficult to unravel. At least 3,500 years ago, the area was occupied by people who roamed both the Great Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills. These folks were truly the first California cavers, burying their dead in many other Mother Lode caves. While we know little about their culture, they probably viewed the cave as a "portal to the Otherworld." It is likely that they explored the cave, but left no evidence of their passing.
The northern Mewuk arrived in the area about 1,200 years ago. Though the tribe feared caves, they called this one "Ootins" and considered it to be one of the places from which humans emerged into the world.
The recent history of Bower cave began just after the Gold Rush of 1849. On March 19, 1851, a miner known only as "Shore" went looking for lost horses and reported finding a large spring in a lime deposit along the North Fork of the Merced River. He also mentioned that he found and explored "a very remarkable cave" in the ledge, christening it Marble Springs Cave. (Jean-Nicolas Perlot, a Belgian gold seeker, may have found the cave at about the same time, but his remembrance of dates is somewhat suspect.) Lacking modern vertical gear, Shore shinnied down one of the immense maple trees covering the "Outer Vault," as the collapse sinkhole was called.
Aprons and Notches
The Speleogens of Bower Cave
The southeast wall of Bower Cave’s Outer Vault has an outstanding record of the cave’s geologic history on display. Faint traces of the originally horizontal bedding of the Paleozoic age marble are visible as nearly vertical bands along the overhanging part of this wall. Their skewed and folded orientation reflects the nearly quarter billion years of inexorable tectonic forces crumpling the rocks of the Sierra Nevada along the west coast of California.
Stacked notches, vertical walls, and aprons reflect the slowly and sometimes not so slowly dropping ground water that dissolved out this huge cavern. The older overhanging walls record a steady enlargement as the ground water began to drain from the cave’s uppermost chamber we now call the Outer Vault. Sections of vertical wall are the result of steady lowering of the ground water. Narrow, horizontal slots reflect short stops in the water’s withdrawal, allowing deeper lateral solution of the marble. The lower walls are made of several narrow and one very wide aprons formed as the water fell at a rapidly increasing rate - probably caused by entrenchment of the adjacent Merced River - and solution slowly waned.
The massive dripstone in the background frames the entrance to The Bat Roost, a domed room now reoccupied by Pale Townsend’s big-eared bats (Corynorhinus townsendii pallescens). These decorations date from when the cave chambers breached the surface. After this momentous event, the cave atmosphere equilibrated with the outside and seeping waters dropped their mineral load. As the ground water providing buoyant support for the roof drained away, the roof itself collapsed, leaving the table-sized, moss-covered breakdown blocks littering the floor. Red terra rosa soil has cascaded down through fissures, appearing as a reddish "river" at the far end of the largest apron.
Originally, four huge Broad-leaf/Big-leaf Maple trees (Acer macrophyllum) grew in the Outer Vault. These were used by the first Indian and White explorers of the cave to negotiate the overhanging 30-meter drop into the Outer Vault. Only one remains, visible at the upper left of this photograph; a relic of years long past. Mosses, ferns, green algae, and a host of other moisture-loving plants cover the walls and floor during the wet winter season.
A long series of owners, many immigrant Frenchmen and Germans, subsequently bought, commercially developed, and sold the cave over the next 100 years.
Nearly everyone suspected the cave extended underwater, but only brief glimpses were possible of a darkened hole leading down through the pellucid waters. But in March 1953, Jon Lindbergh (son of Charles Lindbergh, the first Trans-Atlantic flyer) brought some new fangled Aqua-Lung gear to Bower Cave. Jon studied at Stanford University and had used Scuba equipment for several years. He’d met Ray deSassure and other members of the now near-mythical Stanford Grotto there and was persuaded to visit Bower Cave. Although the use of Scuba was beginning to be common in open water diving, few dared enter caves. Jon Lindbergh’s dive was the first cave dive in the west (and came shortly after the first US cave dive, in Florida in late 1951.)
Donning his thin "frogman" suit and single air tank, he dove into the frigid waters of the cave. Swimming under a natural bridge of jagged ceiling pendants, Jon swam into the cave some 39 ft., then gradually descended nearly 121 ft. to a mud-covered breakdown floor, then followed his air bubbles up about 65 feet into a blackened void. Breaking the water’s surface, he found himself in a large chamber some 46 ft. in diameter and nearly 60 ft. high, unfortunately without any beach or landing spot. The domed ceiling rose up out of sight. Some 20 feet above the pool, a high ledge was festooned with white stalactites, flowstone, and draperies.
Jon paddled around a bit, then, chilled by the 50oF water, returned to the Outer Vault. The organizers were delighted, and newspapers ballyhooed his dives across California.
On later dives, Jon, along with Sterling Pierce of the Western Speleological Institute, explored inwards for nearly 350 ft. to a depth of 124 ft. Art Lange used their notes and sketches to draw a detailed block diagram of the cave.
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