Meeting Minutes February 2023

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Cascade Grotto Meeting (business-only)
Online-only (Zoom)
February 16

Votes

Yearly elections

Elections for officers concluded earlier this month. The results:

Chair

  • 13 votes for Eric
  • 1 vote for empty

Vice-chair

  • 14 votes for Lauren

Secretary

  • 14 votes for Maurice

Treasurer

  • 13 votes for Talon
  • 1 vote with a bad joke

Purchase SPAR book for library

Proposed:

  • Purchase $80 book on small-party assisted rescue from NSS website to add to the library
  • Lauren proposed, Maurice seconded

Result: passed

  • 8 for
  • 2 against
  • 1 abstain

Trips

Trip reports

Oasis cave (Austin, TX)

  • Eric was part of group of 12
  • Was mostly digging: hauled 60 sacks of dirt

Little red river cave

  • Sarah went with some people from the Oregon grotto
  • Is said to be open/reachable in the winter
  • Can get a permit monument headquarters to get key to get into the cave
  • Trip unsuccessful:
    • Camped out at St Helens (very snowy)
    • Tried to hike out in the morning to cave entrance but couldn’t find it
    • Found another sinkhole though uninteresting
    • Went to lake cave instead

Sanger’s Talus cave

  • Eric & Mark went mostly to search for other Talus caves nearby
  • Found a few caves but none were longer than 100 ft; some good survey practice
  • Was a reasonable winter caving destination as easily accessible

Upcoming trips

Lake cave annual beginner trip

  • Likely last week in April
  • Contact Frank or Lauren to help out with scheduling
    • Can use assistance as we’ve been overwhelmed with interest before

Wolf cave beginner vertical trip

  • Likely soon after Lake cave trip
  • May have some SRT practice at Alex creek bridge
  • Dusty organizing; contact him for more info

Jackman creek cave

  • Going digging there in late Feb/early March
  • Short-ish cave by Concrete, WA
  • Contact Maurice for more info

Possible future trips

Oregon grotto trip to St Helens

  • Weekend of June 3rd (big weekend planned)

Trout lake

  • Brad & co usually planning a few during the year

Poet’s crest

  • Mark leading trips in August

Cave ridge

  • Annual trip tentatively scheduled for mid-July

Vancouver island

  • Lots of caves there
  • Will coordinating with Canadians to get us involved in mid-summer

Other Canadian caving

  • Richard willing to offer information as he has contacts

Wallowas in Oregon

  • Tom Kline has some information about it
  • Have ~15 caves from Kim Lauper from Oregon

Marble Mountains in California

  • Trip planned there, Ethan Donahue organizing

Business

Discussion for best practices with vertical practice

  • Should we have liability waivers?
  • Should we limit # of people involved?
  • Policies on buying gear/storing it
  • Contact Eric if you wish to be involved

Survey Practice

  • Reading instruments, making sketches, etc
  • Format may depend on size of group involved (i.e. 10+ people makes it complicated)
  • Lots of people have ideas:
    • Daryl looking to do practical small in-cave trips
    • Lee is interested in doing a very manual format to get a good understanding of the process
    • Richard willing to do presentation on surveying underwater
    • Sarah is interested to show how to calibrate disto/bric etc
  • Contact Daryl and/or Lee if you wish to be involved

Canadian small party rescue training:

  • May be open/available for us in WA
  • Will is planning to go to 28-30
  • website: https://cancaver.ca/bccr/train.htm

Spar scholarship:

  • Do we want to fund this?
  • Will vote on it next meeting

Updated Spar book:

  • Should we buy it?
    • Voted yes

Large-format Windy Creek Map:

  • Amy has this map, hoping to get it scanned and digitized

Caver education

  • Amy raised question if we have specific goals for caver education?
  • How do we get people from being competent to becoming leaders?
    • Is it to make caves be independent/competent
    • Give people milestones/paths to become leaders
    • Sarah mentioned this is a common NSS problem
    • This is a good sub-discussion for our vertical strategy chat (see above)
    • Consider using NCRC skills test
  • Vertical commission lead by Hazel Barton, addresses deficiencies in SRT learning techniques (train the trainers models)
    • We should get involved on this (our vertical strategy chat may be involved)

Library:

  • We currently lack a digitized catalog or online checkout system
    • Goal: have library catalog on the website
    • Would be good to have a google form or spreadsheet to track who has what books
  • Contact Maurice if interested to be involved

Officer Term lengths:

  • Daryl raised if we should have longer terms
  • Should we have 2 year terms and not 1 year terms?
    • Does it take too much time to deal w/ elections presently?
    • Could be tough to recruit a new person to be an officer
    • See: https://cascadegrotto.org/constitution-bylaws-operating-procedure/
  • Can we have a 5th person officer? (e.g. member at large)
  • How about staggering terms? i.e. half of positions voted for every other year
  • Tabled for now

Newsletter:

  • Daryl making new newsletter
    • Please send trip reports to him
    • Thank Laina for regularly offering trip reports
  • Daryl will upload old digitized newsletters to website
  • Can use assistance in posting old digitized library contents to website, too

Spring Party

  • Eric trying to organize something, vaguely caving themed

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