I agree with Andy that the marks David mentioned are likely
from a bear. I've seen such marks in several caves in Virginia and
West Virginia, often quite far from any known entrance and also not
associated with any bones. We've also found large wallows in mud
floors that are said to be where bears slept. These signs seem to be
more common than I would have imagined.
The marks Steve mentioned in Powell's are likely from a
raccoon. We found marks like that several places in Honey Creek, also
far from any known entrance. Of course it doesn't take much of an
entrance for a raccoon, as opposed to a bear...
Mark
At 11:05 AM 1/4/2014, Andy Gluesenkamp wrote:
Bear? I've found bear bones in SA caves and there was even a
sighting in a local park a few years back.
At 10:42 AM 1/4/2014, Steve Keselik wrote:
Some years back in Powell's cave we were hoping to find a shorter
route to the stream passage via the maze. We didn't find any dig
sites that looked promising but we did note some scratch marks about
4' up on the wall that looked like a small animal was trying to get
out of the water as they all were in a horizontal line. If that was
the case then that means there was water pretty high in the cave, In
retrospect maybe it was just bat marks but the line was very
straight with no projections to grab on to....Steve
On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 2:47 AM, David <[email protected]> wrote:
A caver in the San Antonio area once told me ( while sittiing around the
camp-fire in 1995 ) that they were in a cave in or near Bexar County
and saw claw marks on the wall, that were made by an animal that
appeared to be taller than a man and appeared the animal was trying to
climb out of the cave. I think he said it was a short pit
entrance, and there were no bones in the cave of such animal.
My fuzzy memory is that in this conversation he mentioned a Chivos Cave, but
I don't know if that was the one he was referring to.
I think he said there were 4 scratch marks on each hand though.
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