× Robert Carroll Jr. (1941-2005) was one of the fathers of Vermont caving and a meticulous record-keeper. Bob found and documented well over a thousand 'caves' in remote areas of the northeast US. He drew hundreds of detailed maps in several colors showing both cave passages and surface features.

This is a spatial index of Bob Carroll's 'area search' maps. It does not include every hike he did or every place he found a cave. For that, see notebook L. This just shows where he drew an overall hike map, and you have to look up that map using the page number provided. Some observations:

In 1974 he switched his focus from caving to hiking. After that, 99% of his time through 1994 was on trails or roads (or ice). After all, even he couldn't bushwack 30 miles a day. He would go off trail to look at talus piles, but he did not look for solutional caves. He did not carry caving gear on his first trip to any location so he never probed beyond daylight.

For example, on 8/9/1980 he walked right past Stephens Pond Cave, and on 4/22/1983 he walked past the Paradox trailhead marble caves. Even before that, he didn't spend a lot of time digging in sinkholes, and most of John Dunham's Vermont finds have been in places covered by these walks. He never found Tinmouth Fracture Cave despite having directions and looking for it 3 times.

In 1981-1991 he focused on his "hike-link" effort and generally stopped looking even for talus caves. 1986-1996 focused on ice hikes. 1988 began his regular exercise walks on Clarkson Hill (he always walked to work). In 1995 he tried to face up to his paranoia and actually get out caving again, with some success in 1996 and 1999-2002. 2001 began the intermittent pain that grew till his death in 2005.

His mileage estimates were quite accurate - if he tended to overestimate mileage in early years, he underestimated later. Also in early years he would go into posted areas, but not later. For the young folks it is worth noting that rabies and lyme disease did not exist in his area until 1994.

According to his occasional caving partner (of later years) Roger Bartholomew , "Bob did not try dangerous or doubtful checking of leads on his solo trips because of the danger of being trapped alone. This leads me to speculate that there might be some large caves at some of the sites that Bob explored that were not discovered because of Bob's extreme caution."

Thus, the fact that he did or did not walk somewhere is not a good indicator of whether there are caves there. It is a good indicator of whether there is karst there. He generally noted the rock type in write-up. The real reason for this map is to determine if there were places he did not go. And in fact, there are a few obvious gaps in areas with marble that he seems to have missed.

Legend

1963-1973

1974-1982

1983-1995

1996-2005

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