Project Background

Every summer, several trips are planned to Fisher Cave in Meramec State Park to continue the restoration project that was started there several years ago.

For those of you not familiar with the project, here's a little history:

Dozens of tall, totem pole stalagmites in the Ballroom of Fisher Cave were broken over a century and a half ago by early explorers and casual visitors to the cave. Around the time Fisher Cave became a tourist attraction in the early 1900's, the broken stalagmite pieces were moved off the floor of the Ballroom and piled haphazardly in the stream canyons on either side of the room. They remained there for decades, out of the way of the tours, but slowly becoming coated with mud from flooding events. Many of the stalagmite bases were still embedded in the clay floor of the room, but no one knew which stalagmite matched which base.

This was how things stood until the 1980's, when Brian Wilcox (Meramec State Park naturalist) successfully reattached 3 broken stalagmites to their proper bases in the Ballroom.

While volunteering at the cave in 1999, I noticed the muddy stalagmite piles and the numerous "broken stumps" littered throughout the Ballroom. With the permission and support of Brian Wilcox, I was allowed to begin a restoration project in the cave.

Completed Work

The first trip (in the Spring of 2000) involved removing several tens of pounds of old wire, nails, and trash from numerous nooks and crannies along the tourist trail. On subsequent trips over the years, volunteers began the daunting task of retrieving the broken stalagmite pieces from the stream canyons in the Ballroom, cleaning the accumulated mud off them with nylon brushes and cave water, and tying flagging tape to them before temporarily storing them in an out of the way corner of the room on plastic tarps.

Over the past five years, volunteers have cleaned and organized over 250 stalagmite pieces, and with the help and expertise of Jon Beard, over 25 broken pieces have been matched to their bases and successfully reattached with epoxy glue.

During the Summer of 2004, several dozen square feet of flowstone floor was uncovered and cleaned in the Room of Many Colors.

Upcoming Restoration Plans

The plan for the 2006 season is to finish the retrieval, cleaning, and storing of the few dozen remaining stalagmite pieces in the stream canyons of the Ballroom. Then we will move on to the slow process of matching the cleaned pieces with their bases and finally gluing them back together.

We will also be starting on matching individual stalagmites that are broken but appear to be lying close to their original location. Most of these stalagmites are in the Ballroom, but several are located halfway down the Weeping Willow watercrawl (wetsuits are needed).

In addition, we will continue to clean several large areas of flowstone and flowstone floor along sections of the tourist trail, using backpack sprayers and nylon brushes.

(Note: The thousands of historic signatures in the cave are not being removed in this project, since they have been determined to be a unique resource and are therefore being preserved.)

Michael Carter
Project Manager