It is with great sadness that I report the passing of David McKenzie, best
known as the author of the Walls cave mapping program. David began exploring
caves with the University of Texas Speleological Society in the early 1960’s.
This quickly developed into his primary focus, and as mathematics was his field
of study, be began to work on computer programs for plotting cave survey data.
Cave archives contain many finely drawn maps by David from Texas and Mexico.
The most notable among these are from the many expeditions that he made along
with James Reddell to the Yucatan Peninsula starting in the early 1970’s, to
such places as the Grutas de Balankanche. David drove his Blazer across Mexico,
exploring caves such as Sistema Purificación in Tamaulipas, which became the
longest known cave in Mexico. During that time, David had developed a computer
program that he named Ellipse, which ran only on the mainframe computer at the
University of Texas. This benefited many cave exploration projects that were
ongoing in Texas and Mexico. By the 1990’s he was hard at work on a personal
computer version of his program, which he named Walls. This was the pinnacle of
his life’s work, and has been of tremendous benefit to hundreds. For the past
20 years he has constantly maintained and improved Walls, never with any
financial benefit whatsoever.
David long had an interest in supporting the Texas Speleological Survey, which
maintains state cave data. In doing so, he saw the need to develop additional
software to support their data gathering mission. So he created WallsMap, a
simple and effective GIS program for cavers. David put an enormous amount of
his time into gathering and organizing Texas cave data using WallsMap. David
always made himself available to assist his user base in answering questions
and solving problems. He worked nearly every day, serving the caving community,
spending way too much time in front of a computer no doubt. We were so
fortunate to have him with us, in so many ways. He will be missed.
Peter Sprouse
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