Cow Springs

From above you only see a pool about 6 m wide and 12 to 18 m long. Just below the surface the opening narrows, then the walls bell out into caverns many times larger than the pool: a small one to the southeast where daylight enters at the back, a fracture over 12 m high to the northwest, and to the west the largest, which forms a loop. At the base of the debris cone the water wells up between boulders and drains into two siphon tunnels with low, wide bedding planes, an inverted-T fracture and phreatic formations; the flow there is gentle and the water usually clear. Behind the upstream restrictions lies a passage with layered clay banks and fragile goethite formations, where visibility is usually very good.

Strictly speaking Cow is not a spring but a sinkhole with a spring side and a siphon side. The water comes from the northeast, the same direction as at Peacock, Orange Grove and Telford, and resurfaces 150 to 180 m further on at Running Spring, two resurgences on the north bank of the Suwannee; nobody has made that connection yet. For years you could only get upstream in sidemount, through an entrance few people knew, until Lamar Hires, leading students, overheard two open-water divers saying they had been to 21 m. In exchange for a free cave course they showed him a second entrance, big enough for back-mounted cylinders. During the exploration Hires and Woody Jasper installed a hand line to spare the fragile sections ('the poor man's scooter', as Jasper calls it), maintained since 1986; according to Hires the O2ptima CM rebreather ('Choptima') also grew out of the Cow exploration. Wes Skiles, Woody Jasper, Lamar Hires and Tom Morris surveyed most of the system in the mid-1980s, Joerg Hess spent two weeks mapping it in 2002, and in 2026 the NSS-CDS announced a new survey. The NSS-CDS bought the site in 1997; before that, owners gated or posted the land from time to time. The clay banks have been damaged more than once: one diver left a hand and fin print in a layered clay bank just downstream of Not My Fault, another carved his initials into a clay bank closer to the entrance.

Practical: there is a wooden walkway, stairs and platform, changing rooms, diver benches, a tank stand, a picnic table and a portable toilet. In spring and summer poison ivy grows over the path, and trespassers on ATVs sometimes get onto the property: lock up your valuables. Surveys, maps and photographs of the cave may only be published with the written permission of the NSS-CDS board.