Crash, Head Gator
Jim “Crash” Kennedy* is karst ecologist and avid cave conservationist. He is also an acknowledged expert in cave and mine gating, with more than 30 years’ experience, and worked closely with the MasterGater, Roy Powers. Now Jim is the lead instructor (and only remaining instructor of the original five) of the National Bat Gate Workshop series. He was a co-author of the Agency Guide to Cave and Mine Gating, now in its fourth edition (2021, see the Resources section). During his 18 years as a Conservation Ecologist with Bat Conservation International, he focused on the ecology of subterranean habitats, particularly as they affected hibernating bats. He has authored more than a dozen additional papers on cave gating and cave microclimates. He currently chairs the Steering Committee of the National Cave and Karst Management Symposium as representative of the National Speleological Society. He is on the board of the Texas Speleological Survey, and currently Vice-Chair of the Texas Cave Management Association. He has worked on over one hundred cave and mine gate projects across the United States, mostly for difficult sites with Endangered Species. In 2014 he was awarded the US Forest Service’s “Wings Across the Americas” award for two particularly complex gates on a gray bat maternity cave on the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. His philosophy of building cave gates is to design the most secure and aesthetically-pleasing gates possible, while having little to no negative impacts on the site’s ecology, which includes water flow, nutrient transport, and small animal ingress/egress, while maintaining the existing airflow, humidity, and other microclimatic components. No other cave gate builder in the United States has Kennedy’s combined experience as a caver, bat biologist, cave microclimate expert, and experienced gate design engineer. He has been an independent consultant since 2013.
Dozens of other cavers have worn the lime-green shirt since the formation of the company, hired on as needed for specific projects. If you think you want to earn a shirt for yourself, then fill out this form.
* The nickname came from a 1987 winter bat census in Pennsylvania’s Canoe Creek Mine, when a breakdown slope collapsed, carrying him over a drop, resulting in a broken pelvis.