Under Ben Lomond Mountain: A Short History of
the Cave Gulch Area, Santa Cruz, CA
 Bruce Rogers and Dan Snyder - Western Cave Conservancy 

In Santa Cruz County, half the 64 known karst features are located in small masses of Late Permian(?) to Triassic(?) age marble in Ben Lomond Mountain.

Most of the Cave Gulch caves appear to pre-date the uplifted marine terraces they are located under, thus are older than 125,000 years old. The Awaswas Ohlone people probably knew of the caves, but apparently left no record of their use. Sebastian Vizcaino explored the coastline of Monterey Bay by ship in 1602, but land expeditions did not reach Santa Cruz until 1769. The first European settlers arrived after the founding of Mission Santa Cruz in 1791 and nearby Pueblo de Branciforte in 1797. These early settlers used lime to plaster their adobe buildings, but may have manufactured it from seashells rather than limestone. Nevertheless, they must have been aware of the limestone above Santa Cruz, since the mission water supply derived from its springs. Some limestone may have been quarried as early as the late Mexican period (1840s), but the earliest records pertain to the American period, from 1850 on. It seems likely that earlier residents had already found the most obvious caves.

The oldest known report about a Cave Gulch cave is an 1860 newspaper description of Empire Cave (Jordan's Cave), alleging its discovery by quarry owner Albion P. Jordan in 1853. This cave has been well-known to local residents ever since; still visible scratched into the walls are dates from the 1880s onward. Stearns Cave was "discovered" and named for a Mr. Stearns prior to 1943. Dr. Norman Dolloff of San Jose State Univ. discovered Dolloff Cave in the 1950-51 El Nino winter. Bill Miles and his IXL Club dug open the cave named for them in fall or winter of 1953. We have little knowledge of the other Cave Gulch caves' history, save that most were known by the early 1950s.

The caves are small, but were once highly decorated. After a highly publicized cave rescue in 1954 and the opening of an adjacent University of California campus in 1965, visitation and accompanying vandalism to the caves increased. By the late 1960s these caves were gutted hulks of their former selves. Passages opened or rediscovered since then have met the same fate. Photographs of IXL Cave taken in 1953-54 and of the new Sunday Section in 1967-68 will be compared to images taken of the same locations today.

Despite the damage, the Cave Gulch caves have extraordinary biological interest, harboring several endemic invertebrates and a population of Pacific Giant salamanders having an unusually high frequency of neoteny (retention of gills as an adult).

Attempts to control access have not been successful, Empire Cave having been ineffectively gated or barricaded 16 times since about 1950. Since inclusion of most of the Cave Gulch caves in Wilder Ranch State Park in 1998, attempts to manage the caves have met with poor success due to the remote location of the caves from Park Headquarters and the shortage of park law enforcement.

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