Piper Cave, Smith County, Tennessee

April 2024

Gate Type: WINDOW

Imagine a large, critically important cave used by Federally endangered gray bats. Imagine that saltpeter miners labored for years to extract a crucial ingredient for gunpowder from the cave’s sediments, abruptly abandoning everything in the cave when the Civil War ended. Now imagine a doomsday prepper buying the cave, bulldozing the entire cave floor (relics and all), and moving a full-sized RV into the cave along with barrels of supplies, a hot tub, and other “necessities” for riding out armageddon. Now you have Piper Cave. Cory Holliday of the Tennessee Chapter of The Nature Conservancy spent several years and tens of thousands of hard-fought dollars to restore this cave to a semblance of its former grand self. The last step was installing a bat gate on the main entrance. This is where we came in. All photos © Jim Kennedy.

A few of the massive piles of trash removed from the cave.
There were three great things about this project: you could drive right up to the entrance, the weather was great, and Cory recruited a ton of volunteers.
The steel delivery truck couldn’t make the last sharp turn to the cave, but this was remedied with a TNC ATV.
The gate is rolling right along as the first column goes up.
Now the second column goes up. Please don’t let it fall over and kill someone!
With the center columns up and the hangers attached, it’s almost time for the horizontal bars.
After the rains, the entrance slope became exceedingly slippery, which was a big problem when transporting an 4’x8′ piece of human-sized cheese grater.
Lower pin holes are much easier to drill, but sometimes you wish you were wearing kneepads.
Occasionally the columns, hangers and bars don’t line up exactly right. We use this technique to help them do that.
As we near completion, it’s time to work on the Window through which most of the bats will exit each summer night.
Working on the purposely-flimsy Window is a lot of fun. Not!
The completed Window from the side.
And from the front.
And here’s the bat’s-eye view of the entire finished gate.