Windeler Gate in Progress
Published: Summer, 2008

Last year WCC signed an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service to manage Windeler Cave. Since that time we’ve made progress on the most urgent task: constructing a new gate.

Windeler is a beautiful cave in California’s Mother Lode area. The cave’s previous stewards did a great job keeping it safe; including sealing the entrance after a break-in compromised the previous gate. So the first job we set ourselves as the new stewards was to re-open the cave while still keeping it secure. Hence the need for a new and very solid cave gate.

The challenge is unusual. Many nearby caves are used by bats, and would require  bat-friendly gates. However, Windeler has never in its long history been open to the surface, and thus, was never colonized by bats. Our goal is to keep the cave just as it has always been, so that means keeping bats, dry air currents, and vandals out.

The current gate design has come together through a combination of creativity and luck. Members of the Windeler subcommittee Doug Bradford and Jim Hildebrand have been using their spare time to move this project forward. Jim and others had been penciling out various gate designs, but three factors focused that effort. First, the Forest Service made it clear that any gate replacement project should have minimum impact on the soil and rock near the entrance; that eliminated large gate designs. Second, Doug by chance got hold of a large piece of 3/4-inch thick stainless steel. And finally, Jim happens to work with a machinist with the tools and expertise to build the gate.

The basic gate design is now complete, and the steel has been cut to shape. That in itself was a challenge, since even a plasma torch could not do the job. In fact, the best way to cut this plate was on a special industrial machine that uses a computer controlled, high-pressure water jet enriched with crushed garnet to slowly cut the plate. Sounds very expensive right? Well, Jim explored his contacts at work, telling people about this interesting and worthy project, and managed to get the plate cut for free!

So it’s taken longer than we hoped, but luck has been with us. Of course, things move slowly in any volunteer effort, but the project is moving forward. We are very grateful to those involved, and we all have a responsibility to take great care and do this right. In the near future, it’s likely we’ll need  grunt work in the service of installing the gate. If we work together, once again people will be able to see the wonders of Windeler Cave.