sewers

Robert Osburn (yellow helmet, recording and sketching) and WUSTL graduate student Jenny Lippmann (measuring and doing compass readings) conducting the cave survey in a small passage of 23 degree cave in Crawford County, Missouri.The Caves of St. Louis County and the Bridges of Madison County share a common theme: loss. The former, a scholarly paper that appears as the sole entry of the current issue of Missouri Speleology, is a description of some of St. Louis County’s 127 known caves and a warning that development over the past two centuries has eliminated or destroyed many caves in a state that could quite rightly call itself the Cave State. The latter is a tear-jerking novel, made into a movie by Clint Eastwood about a doomed, unlikely love affair, a hallmark of the ’90s with all the permanence of the Backstreet Boys. Caves, though, are in trouble, in St. Louis County, Missouri, and elsewhere, says co-author Robert Criss, Ph.D., professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.