
Huge Commercial Cave in the Ozarks for Sale - SQL2219
http://arkhaven.org/Huge_cavern_system.htm
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Zaheer
"15,000 CAVE VISITORS A YEAR

GROSSING $200,000 A YEAR

NETTING $75,000 A YEAR

$500,000 FOR CAVE AND 27 ACRES

$725,000 FOR CAVE AND 70 ACRES that also has an undeveloped cave on it"
[http://arkhaven.org/arkansas_real_estate.htm](http://arkhaven.org/arkansas_real_estate.htm)

$75K / year net on a $500k property isn't bad at all (~15%). With a bit of
work the property could have even more potential.

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greglindahl
... no mention of how much liability insurance would cost.

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Chickenosaurus
The net profit should already account for all costs including liability
insurance.

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gbrits
emphasis on should

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NDizzle
I visited this cave a few times growing up. The neatest thing about the cave
is after the section where you can squeeze through (if dressed appropriately
and you want to) a tiny opening, in the large cavern beyond there is a tree
stump in the middle of the room. I don't know who moved it there or how they
moved it there, but it always was amazing to me as a child. See the pictures
of the people covered in red clay to get an idea of how tiny the opening is.

I grew up about 40 miles away from this cave.

~~~
sdenton4
I grew up in Missouri; my dad was amember of the Missouri Speleological
Society, and we spent a lot of weekends wandering into unlit holes in the
earth.

Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee are built on limestone and have a lot of
subterranean water moving around - meaning there are a lot of caves. Like, a
kind of stupid number of caves. When I was a kid, Missouri had more caves than
any other state, but it lost the title to Tennessee at some point, as more and
more caves were found to be connected to one another. And a few of these caves
have been commercialized for a very long time, like the one in the posting.
The caves are a pretty magical feature of an otherwise (IMO) pretty bland part
of the country.

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jjeaff
Bland? The Ozark region in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri is
absolutely gorgeous with rolling Green hills in the summer and beautiful
foliage in the fall.

Not to mention the unique dialects and culture that was cultivated in somewhat
of a vacuum for a few hundred years due to the relatively difficult terrain
that kept accessibility low.

Go farther north or west, and yes, I agree the views get pretty repetitive.

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read_only
This land should be bought for preservation by the state, feds, or a
nonprofit. There are always unique species and history in places like this.

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robk
The caves look cool but the Prepper links on that page make me very wary of
the kinds of neighbors you'd have there!

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TheAdamAndChe
Why? Prepping is a common hobby among the rich:
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-
prep-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-
super-rich)

~~~
gnu8
How does the fact that the preppers are rich argue against being wary of them?

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TheAdamAndChe
Well there's a general perception of preppers as being paranoid, gun-toting,
aggressive hillbillies, and the fact that it's often done by the top 1% shows
that it's kind of an inaccurate stereotype.

~~~
jsjohnst
I’m not sure where you got that perception, it’s certainly not the general one
in my opinion. Breaking it down... Paranoid, yes. Gun-toting, usually.
Aggressive, sometimes. Hillbillies is where I have to call it though. I’d
argue there’s as many rich as there are anything else, if not more. I don’t
know about you, but I’d be a little wary of folks preparing for a doomsday.
Not saying I’d never consider it, but generally they are going to be a bunch
uneasy with others, hence I’m going to be cautious around them.

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michaelbuckbee
If you think this is interesting, checkout
[http://www.caveland.us/](http://www.caveland.us/) \- it's a quarried cave
that was a roller-rink in the 50s/60s, abandoned and then converted into a
residence.

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SQL2219
If you're Lex Luther, this would be ideal for your HQ2.

~~~
dalbasal
Would suit a range of supervillains or brooding hero's, really.

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mrfusion
Would someone mind calling and getting the price for us?

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lettergram
$5000 in earnest money is fairly low for the size of lot. I'm not going to
call, but I'd put money on it being <$1M

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TheAdamAndChe
<$1M for 186 acres plus a massive cave with tons of commercial infrastructure
within it? No, it's almost surely over a million, especially if a good chunk
of that 186 acres is farmable.

~~~
maxerickson
Here's a lead on it:

[http://marionrecord.com/direct/this_man_cave_is_not_metaphor...](http://marionrecord.com/direct/this_man_cave_is_not_metaphorical+4746cave+54686973206d616e2063617665206973206e6f74206d65746170686f726963616c)

Here we go, recently listed at $400,000:

[http://www.mossyoakproperties.com/land/23324](http://www.mossyoakproperties.com/land/23324)

So unless a lot of work was put into it, probably still around there. The
website is still up:

[http://www.hurricanerivercaverns.com/](http://www.hurricanerivercaverns.com/)

~~~
codingdave
A lot of work has been put into it. The owners facebook page shows 18 months
of he and his family rebuilding stairs, walkways, improving the exterior, re-
doing lights, etc.

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Aardwolf
Genuinly nice and efficient (fast to load and scroll) website design.

Of course looking at the HTML code removes the illusion of sleek hand coding,
instead a now dated proprietery program seems to have been used.

But still better than a slow page involving 100 JS frameworks to display a
single article :)

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endless1234
The page weighs in at almost 9 megabytes. How is that efficient and fast to
load? Lazy loading images would be a small and needed improvement - but of
course it would require the horrible jaava skript to be used, which must be
avoided at all costs.

~~~
UnquietTinkerer
I don't understand how lazy loading could help here. The images are all behind
hyperlinks, and their display sizes are all hardcoded into the HTML. There is
nothing preventing the browser from completing the page layout immediately and
backfilling the images as the load.

That is not to say the page is well-designed or pretty - it is hideous. But
lazy loading would make it strictly worse by adding js parse+eval latency on
top of the loading time for the images.

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Animats
As a roadside attraction, it's not likely to be worth the trouble as a
business Someone rich will buy this as a vacation retreat / emergency shelter.

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rmchugh
Quote from the root page:

"God is calling multitudes of CHRISTIAN PREPPERS to the Ozarks to prepare for
this time of social, economic, and spiritual breakdown of American society...
in these end-times. Learn spiritual lessons on why and how to prepare. The
“where to prepare” is the Ozarks, and the “when to prepare” is now… last
year!"

Wow.

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joelhaasnoot
I wonder if using the caves could be used to hold a small datacenter with
minimal cooling costs. (Maybe a geothermal cooling loop?)

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geraldcombs
There's some precedent for this. Kansas City, MO has a large network of man-
made caves[1]. I remember back in the '90s at least one ISP (Tyrell?) had a
data center there. A quick search shows that some companies still host
there[2].

    
    
      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubTropolis
      [2] https://stckc.com/

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baddox
Springfield, Missouri (in the Ozarks) has the Springfield Underground, an
impressive and huge underground commercial space used for warehousing and data
centers.

[http://springfieldunderground.com/](http://springfieldunderground.com/)

