Here's what you should know about kayaking Springfield's Sequiota Cave

2022-04-02 06:42:55 By : Mr. Kevin Jia

Kayaking is my favorite past time, and I did my first float of the year in a cave.

Springfield-Greene County Park Board opened its spring boat tours of Sequiota Cave for a couple of weekends in March, and the past couple of years have seen an added mode of transportation. In addition to the johnboats, kayaks were added just after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as another way to experience the cave.

Lead by our guide Jerome Brauner, my partner Trent Holloway and I joined a small group in gearing up. We brought our own head lamps to better illuminate the darkness, fitted ourselves with hard hats to protect our noggins and shrugged into life jackets before boarding our kayaks.

You'll step into your kayak from the shore, while avoiding entering the water if at all possible. To protect the fragility of the cave, we also wore gloves to avoid transferring any oils if we accidentally touched any stalagmites or stalactites.

The farther you get into the cave, the darker it's going to get. At one point, Brauner had us turn off our head lamps. With the red lights on, we got to see the tiniest bat hibernating. It was a tri-colored, also referred to as a chicken nugget bat. 

Sequiota Cave is home to many bats, including gray bats. Gray bats are federally and state endangered. Their populations have decreased more than 70 percent since 1976, and gray bats have been found in Missouri as far back as 1933, according to Washington University in St. Louis.

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A concern continues to be white-nose syndrome, which is caused by a fungus growing on bats. The attacks the bare skin of bats while they’re hibernating in a relatively inactive state. As it grows, it causes changes in bats that make them become active more than usual and burn up fat they need to survive the winter. Bats with white-nose syndrome may do strange things like fly outside in the daytime in the winter, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

To reiterate, the cave's fragile state, along with the vulnerable bat populations, means access to the depths are limited to coincide with bats' migration, and the cave is off limits most of the year.

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Once the lights all clicked on, we continued our slow paddle while Brauner shared different tidbits of the cave, including how it was used to grow mushrooms at one point or wired for electricity in the past.

As we neared our turnaround spot, I was thankful for my helmet as my head came close to scraping the rock ceiling.

My preference is the blue Pelican sit-in I've had for years. I've steered clear of sit-on-tops because they aren't as easy to maneuver, in my opinion. Holloway regularly uses one, and we jokingly call it our "trash barge." It's big and beautiful to collect trash as we float whatever waterway.

I didn't voice my preference quick enough at Sequiota, and I found myself in a sit-on-top kayak for the first time in my kayaking career, and it proved to be quite the challenge for me in navigating certain parts of the cave.

Visit https://www.parkboard.org/ to learn more.

Sara Karnes is an Outdoors Reporter with the Springfield News-Leader. Follow along with her adventures on Twitter and Instagram @Sara_Karnes. Got a story to tell? Email her at skarnes@springfi.gannett.com.