Sphinx Cave is a limestone cave located in the Chiricahua Mountains of Southeastern Arizona. This cave, unlike others in Arizona, is near a road and is fairly accessible by car and foot. Knowledge of the existence of this cave was historically limited, but in recent years locals have "discovered" the cave resulting in a large increase of traffic. Unfortunately this has led to the cave being vandalized on several occasions. This cave is the seasonal home to a summer maternity roost for bats, which can be very sensitive to disturbance. With growing awareness of the importance of bats to the local ecology, and increasing concerns regarding cave resource conservation by local groups, steps were taken with the USFS Coronado Forest to install a bat-friendly gate inside the cave. Gating of this cave allows for seasonal closure for the protection of the bats, and also allows for the facilitation of recreational and research visits to the cave when permissible.

Trail Work

The project first began with a day trip to the cave for trail building and site preparation. The old trail to the cave originally went straight up a hill and had severe erosion problems. For this project we decided to reroute the trail with a gentler slope so that we would be able to later carry the heavy gate, generator, and welding equipment up to the cave. One section of trail edged around a large rock outcropping so we had to manually build up that section with stacks rock and fill dirt. We also moved some rocks and dirt in the area where the gate would be built inside the cave. This was done to improve the bat flyway path adjacent to the gate.

The gate fabrication in our shop took about two days of work. We then spent an additional day packing up all the tools and equipment needed to install the gate. On the appointed day, our group all met at the bottom of the hill below the cave, ready to haul hundreds of pound of tools and materials up a steep hill.

1 | 2 | 3