My Rant Concerning Cave Mapping

1. My Views

The act of surveying a cave should not simply be viewed as a way to gain access to explore/scoop a cave.

If the countless hours spent surveying a cave never produces any map then the whole time and effort is a useless waste. In this case the survey of the cave was only used as an "ethical way" to explore/scoop the cave. It would have been much faster and efficent to outright scoop the cave in a full gait.

If a cave map is not useful to navigate or represent a cave's resources then the whole survey and mapping project is a failure.

The survey of a cave is one step in the actual goal of producing a map of a cave. Drafting the map is the more important step and the hardest for people to complete.

The goal of drafting of cave map is simply to create a representation of the reality of a cave resource and to let others view the context of the resource. To do this it is sometimes necessary to distort the cave map to represent the actual resource better. For example certain features must be spaced out on paper to be able to view them otherwise a jumbled mess is produced. Extremely detailed true accurate representations are needed when the intended use of a cave map is for certain scientific publication. Still clarity of the representation is of incredible importance.

The draft of a cave map should always be done with the intended use of the cave map in mind. Ones personal mapping style or the new hot drafting style in use is not always the best way to represent a cave. What is more important is the intended purpose the map is going to serve.

Cave maps should be drafted with needs of the map user placed first.

2. My Considerations

A small cave can be drafted on one sheet and still retain all the nessasary detail. A large cave needs to be drafted in quads to retain the same level of detail.

Caves should be drafted to a scale such that the average passage width will be no smaller than 1/4 inch wide on the final reduced map. For very very big passage or rooms several inches may be necessary

The size of lettering should be scaled up for working maps if the final scale is to be considerably reduced. The final reduced map should never have any lettering smaller that 8 point. S p a c e lettering out so it is easier to read when reduced. If the final draft is going to have a 12 point font and the original is has been reuced by 50%, the original font size needs to be 24 point on original.

Too much floor detail that strives to much to represent reality can clutter a map and make it hard to use. Representation of features by generic symbols can do a better job sometimes. That is why we have so many map symbols. Use map symbols. Space the symbols to add clarity but still communicate the conditions found in the cave. Don't draw every piece of breakdown as it looks in the cave. Simply place a few breakdown symbols to represent breakdown.

Certain resources are best described in a note off to the side of the passage instead of trying to draw it in.

Certain resources should be left off the map for the protection of those resources. Two versions of the map may be produced in this case. A sanitized and unsanitized map. Consider the future distribution of all maps even many years in the future. Consider that someone may come behind you and let unsanitized maps get in the wrong hands.