The park is under the control of the Jessamine County Fiscal Court and it has operating hours from basically dawn until dusk. Please be observant of this fact. Most of the park staff knows about "geocaching" and even have found a few of them by accident while maintaining the park. These folks are pretty nice, be nice to them too, they allow us to play here.
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Kentucky is one of the most famous karst areas in the world. Much of the state's beautiful scenery, particularly the horse farms in the Bluegrass Region, is the result of development of karst landscape. The karst topography of Kentucky is mostly on limestone, but also some dolostone.
This Karst topography is created by rainwater which dissolves and widens cracks in the limestone bedrock. This creates land forms such as shafts, tunnels, caves, and sinkholes. Groundwater seeps into and through these land forms. Rainwater soaking into the ground at higher elevations have leeched into the ground and into the limestone until they have reached a harder non- permeable layer of bedrock and have surfaced here to form the spring.
Karst systems are one of the greatest suppliers of aquifers, with nearly 25% of the drinking water (in the United States) flowing through a karst. The rapid recharge of the subterranean aquifers does mean that little filtration may occur with certain water sources. One of the hazards of drinking the water from a Karst spring is that bats may live in some of the underground caverns and their waste contains bacteria as well as other illness causing microbes that may get into the ground water. This may lead to potential pollution and contamination hazards.
Springs typically come in three types, seepage, fractured and tubular.
* Seepage or filtration spring. The term seep refers to springs with small flow rates in which the source water has filtered into permeable earth.
* Fracture springs, discharge from faults, joints, or fissures in the earth, in which springs have followed a natural course of voids or weaknesses in the bedrock.
* Tubular springs are essentially water dissolved and created underground channels, basically cave systems.
This spring flows from a Karst area and produces a very good and clean flow.
During the days of Camp Nelson, it was known as "The Officers' Spring". Under orders, the spring was kept under guard by the Provost and its usage was strictly restricted to officers only. All other usage including horses or livestock was forbidden.
I hope you paid attention because some of the answers are located within the text, other are available by going to the cache location.
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~ The area to the west of the spring is a pretty place to bring a blanket or chair, a book or lunch and listen to the songbirds sing. ~
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**** Please DO NOT MOVE any rocks around the spring or the retention pond. There is no reason to bother anything to get the answers to log this earthcache. All information should be obtainable from the bridge across the nearby stream. ****
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As part of the education experience, it is required that you be able to answer some questions about your visit.
To obtain credit for this cache email me the answers to the following questions….
1. While standing at the coordinates, give the estimated depth of the water in the retention pond.
2. How far does the spring water have to flow to get to the retention pond?
3. What type of spring is this?
4. What safety issues are there with spring water?
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Once you email me the answers, go ahead and post. If your answers are wrong, I will notify you.
While no photos are necessary to log this cache, feel free to post as many as you like. (Please, no spoilers.)
Good Luck!
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