Bat Cave
Alachua County, Florida
October 19, 2008

Traveled with a small group to Bat Cave today. The trip was organized by FSS member Cara Gentry. She was leading a group of geology students from Santa Fe Community College through the cave. The property the cave is on is owned by Santa Fe Community College. The property itself was gated as was each entrance and pit, 5 total. We didn't have any access to the wild entrance, however we did have access to a stair well that was built into the cave. The cave is well named, as the first thing I saw out of the stairs were three bats sleeping. After the stairs there was a few feet of crawling that lead to a circular room with three passages, one straight forward and one both to the left and right. Straight forward passage led on for quite some time through some narrow squeezes and finally opened up into a fairly large room. A few gargoyles have been planted in the cave, presumably by Santa Fe Community College. The right passage lead to the "lake" in the cave. The water level was fairly low, so low in fact that I was able to step right over it. around the lake there was another small room with some interesting fossils in the roof, including one fossilised crab and a fossilised bone on the floor from an unknown animal. It continued on into a small squeeze that I didn't attempt. The left passage lead to many other rooms and one very long, very muddy, crawl space. The cave apparently floods when it rains, as marked by the mud on the walls of the crawl space.