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CaveFinder started with a simple question: can LiDAR terrain data tell you where to look for caves before you drive out to a ridge?

High-resolution elevation data exists for most of the US at 1-meter resolution, but there was no accessible tool for cavers to analyze it for cave entrance signatures. The data has been sitting in public USGS repositories, and it turns out that terrain features associated with cave entrances — depressions, convergent slopes, characteristic morphology — are visible in that data if you know what to look for

CaveFinder automates that analysis. You draw a box on a map, we pull the LiDAR data, run the terrain through a scoring algorithm, and give you a ranked list of candidates with coordinates, confidence scores, and terrain views. It's not magic and it's not perfect — but it gives you a much better starting point than staring at topo maps and guessing

The free tier gives you 3 analyses per day with the top 10 candidates. Pro unlocks everything — all candidates, the Ridgewalk Planner, exports, and larger scan areas

We're a small operation (Buzzy LLC, based in New Mexico) and we're building this because we're cavers who wanted this tool to exist. Feedback from the caving community is what drives development — if you have thoughts, reach out at help@cavefinder.app

LiDAR works by bouncing laser pulses off the ground from aircraft, creating elevation maps accurate to centimeters. Millions of laser returns per flight build a point cloud that captures the shape of the landscape in extraordinary detail

Unlike aerial photography, LiDAR penetrates tree canopy — it sees the ground, not the leaves. This is critical for caving, because the most interesting karst terrain is often in heavily forested areas where surface features are completely hidden from view

For cavers, this means terrain features that are completely invisible under forest cover become visible in the data. Sinkholes, collapse features, cliff lines, and subtle depressions that you'd walk right past in the field show up clearly in LiDAR-derived elevation models

The USGS 3DEP program has been systematically collecting LiDAR across the US, creating a publicly available dataset that covers most of the country at 1-meter resolution. It's one of the most underused public datasets for cave exploration

CaveFinder leverages this data to identify terrain signatures that correlate with cave entrances — turning raw elevation data into a prioritized list of places worth investigating