There's something about boys and caves. Give a boy a hole in the ground big enough to climb in and off he goes, usually with a couple of friends in tow and with no thought to the warnings his mother gives him about staying out of such places. A look at San Antonio's history makes it clear we've got a lot of caves and a lot of boys.
"Two weary explorers were rescued from Robber Baron's Cave after a Tom Sawyer-like adventure," an article in the San Antonio Express noted on December 7, 1948. It seems the boys decided to go into the cave on the north side, exploring with a candle until they ran out of matches (boys aren't known for their planning skills), and had to be rescued by deputies who'd been alerted by a third boy wise enough not to go inside. The cave in question is one with an especially strong pull on local boys, located off Nacogdoches Road just inside Loop 410 on yes, Cave Lane. In the summer of 1961, Lee High School junior Harry Roberson had to be pulled out of the same cave after a group of teens tried exploring it. No doubt a few thousand boys had tried their luck in the meantime, didn't get stuck and avoided making the headlines.
The reporter referred to it as if the Robber Baron name was well-entrenched, but a feature story in 1957 by local historian Sam Woolford refers to "Robber's Cave off Fredericksburg Road where the Pitts and Yeager Gang secreted loot." The same article mentions an "old stone-lined corridor which disappears into the earth in San Pedro Park [which] has had its share of fantastic tradition," a cave under a house near Main and Summit Avenues, and Shepherd's Cave in the Scenic Loop Area that that could hold about a thousand sheep in bad weather. In 1973 an article claimed that the Handy-Andy supermarket at New Braunfels and Nacogdoches Roads (now HEB) was built over a cave.
San Antonio wouldn't be a million-plus city without the many caves in the area, because some of them direct millions of gallons of water into the Edwards Aquifer which, a few hundred years or so later, we drink. A 1961 exploration of a cave on the Mason Ranch near Uvalde led geologists into a cave that ran four miles underground with a river in it three to 11 feet deep. Geologists knew back then that was how we got our water, but were surprised at the enormity of the cave system. It led to what was probably the first concrete-lined portal for aquifer recharge. Today hundreds of them exist, usually paired with a small dam to hold back rainwater until it can drain underground.
And of course, caves attract almost as many bats as boys. Austin is widely known for its bats because thousands of them roost under local bridges, but San Antonio easily beats that number. Bracken Cave northeast of the city holds the world's record as a bat condo, with a 1974 article noting some 35 to 40 million Mexican free-tailed bats as seasonal residents. For environmental reasons, the cave has never been commercialized, but there are ways to go there some evenings to watch the bats form up for their nightly feasts. Just make sure you take a clothespin for your nose--it's amazing how just a few million tons of bat guano can affect the olfactory nerve.
We're not the first society to poke through area caves, either. In 1961 Fred Mason was going through another cave on his property near Uvalde and found about two dozen old skeletons in the cave estimated to be two to six thousand years old. Six years after that, Norm Hitzfelder was exploring a cave on his ranch about 25 north of San Antonio and found bones at least that old, including one skull "with an unusually large brow ridge," suggesting Neanderthal settlement, although there's been no proof of human life here that long ago (around 40,000 years B.C.).
Not many people live in caves these days, but in 1972 a Frenchman spent six months in a cave in the Del Rio area as part of the early research into human biological rhythms. On Valentine's Day of that year, Michel Siffre went into a cave to get away from all environmental indications of the passage of time. During his hermitage, Siffre's body swung from a 27-hour "day" up to 48, averaging around 28 hours between wake-up times. He emerged 208 days later and said he was "surprised to learn how much time had passed." In 1988, Siffre oversaw a 210-day experiment in Europe. The Italian who broke Siffre's record came out thinking he had spent only 79 days inside.
There are plenty of commercial caves around San Antonio, and any one of them can provide you with enough oohs and ahhs to satisfy your inner little boy (or girl). After all, not all caving adventures end happily. One of the early news stories I covered here was a spelunking accident on Fair Oaks Ranch in the late 1970s. Seeing a lifeless body pulled out of a cave entrance by a cable winch cured me of ever wanting to try it on my own.
