In places these piles of bat deposit reached almost to the top of the cave. Later we found that this guano reached almost a quarter of a mile in length and stretched some 75 feet in width. Some of the piles later proved to be over a hundred feet deep!
Even the crudest calculation would have shown that there was enough guano here to merit the cost and trouble of getting it out of the cave and selling it commercially. At that moment I decided to stake a mining claim on the cave.
We felt that for one day we had seen enough and were ready to head back to the entrance and call it a day. The bats were apparently the sole tenants of the cave, for we saw no evidence of any other living thing ever having invaded its dark, vast interior.
Lynn headed up the ladder first and I asked him to go to the wagon and get four small cloth sacks for me. When he dropped them through the opening, Andy and I went back to where the guano was and filled the sacks. I wanted to have the guano tested to make sure it was of good enough quality to make my contemplated mining operation worth while.
It would be silly to go to all the trouble of getting this guano to the surface and into Carlsbad, only to find that it was of inferior quality and not worth the cost and trouble of extracting it.
"How are you going to get this stuff up to the surface?" Andy asked as I was filling the sacks.
"By Ned, I don't know, but there's a way, and I'll find it."
As we wound our way back to the rope ladder, Andy and I each had two sacks of the guano, one in each hand. We made it up the ladder and out into the open again.
"Now I'm going to do something about marking this place, to show I've been here." A short distance from the entrance to the cave was a mescal pit, possibly left by Indians.
"Here, Andy, give me a hand," and with that we began gathering several large stones and placed them one on top of another until we had a pile some four or five feet high. This would have to serve as a marker until the claim could be completed.