Exploring

All work and no play is never a good thing, right? Jason and I actually took a little break from farm work today and did a bit of exploring. I was walking up the driveway from the back of the farm and I could hear Jason crashing around in the woods around the spring that cuts through the middle of our farm. It is a good thing Jason isn’t a hunter of any sort since he is about as quiet as a bull in a china shop.

Anyway I heard Jason crashing around so I stood and waited for him to make an appearance. He finally came out of the woods and called me over. He was very excited as he had found another small cave. We have a spring that originates on our farm, and it cuts across the middle of our property. We built our driveway over it so anyone who has driven the length of our driveway has seen the spring. The spring originates at a cave opening and we had spent some looking around that area once. Sadly I realized it has been almost two years since we did that when I found the pictures.

the cave opening we knew about and where the spring comes above ground

the bricks clearly indicate that someone else used to enjoy hanging out around this cave at some point

The horses are fenced out of the spring and also the creek that runs along the southern edge of the farm. The spring feeds into the creek, which is part of the Robertson Fort Creek watershed. It was a beautiful day today,the last of the blankets were removed and all the horses are naked again, and Jason felt the urge to follow the path of the spring. Amazingly we had never followed the whole spring, just looked at parts of it here and there.

Jason was quite excited to realize that we had another small cave opening along the spring. The spring had a fork in it, and the majority of the water flow stayed on the path to feed into the creek. Until today we thought that was where all of the spring water went. However at the fork the water feeds into a cave opening a few feet away. At some point we need to do some more exploring and see where the water goes once it is in the cave.

The fork in the spring; most of the water continues on around the curve to the left, but some of the flow diverts to the fork at the right.

This is where the water flows if it follows the fork at the right. This small cave entrance is only a few feet from the fork.

Finding cave openings is nothing special in middle Tennessee, I remember reading an article once that said something like 8,600 caves have been documented and explored in Tennessee. My parents’ farm has a couple of huge cave openings on it and we’ve done some exploring in them. We even found a few civil war artifacts as we looked around. However it is still fun to explore our farm and find hidden surprises even though one should pretty much expect to find a cave on your property in Tennessee.

It was nice change of pace to spend a few minutes doing some exploring on such a beautiful day.

a deer path crossing the spring

Jason the explorer, he loved that it was still so green and vibrant around the spring in the woods.

Since I had my rubber boots on I splashed my away across the creek.

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Leo and Chance

Faune rolling with a big audience. They each took a turn as you can see just by looking at them (Silver, Lotus, Romeo, Winston, Gus getting ready to roll, and Asterik)