Huge Commercial Cave in the Ozarks for Sale | Hacker News Reader

Huge Commercial Cave in the Ozarks for Sale

arkhaven.org

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"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

$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.

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

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

emphasis on should

I think that might be a different cave, but your points stand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Why? Prepping is a common hobby among the rich: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...

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

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.

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.

That’s a really interesting article, thanks for bringing it up!

You're way out in the middle of the most rugged portion of the ozarks on a 170 acre plot. If you don't want to encounter neighbors you don't need to.

The rest of that arkhaven.org site makes me think that highlighting the cave listing is a bit of lede-burying.

If you think this is interesting, checkout 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.

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

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

Would someone mind calling and getting the price for us?

$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

<$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.

Here's a lead on it:

http://marionrecord.com/direct/this_man_cave_is_not_metaphor...

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

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/

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.

Here’s the page from that domain that should have been used, which gives the prices: http://arkhaven.org/arkansas_real_estate.htm

“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”

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 :)

I have a good internet line and a fast computer but the images took pretty long to load, all the while making the website hard to use. So I don't really observe the same behaviour as you.

Looks like some images are higher resolution than displayed, that makes them slower to load I guess, but on the bright side one can right click and "view image" to see the stalactites in larger glory :)

Yes, so that seems in line with old school website building as well ;). There could have been smaller images that linked to bigger ones.

All I mean to say that old web technology is not always better. While I agree with your original comment with regards to 'modern' web tech often venturing deep into the field of over-engineering.

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.

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.

Baffled by the ugly=better trend on HN and elsewhere. The linked site scores low in readability and overall UX, this "still better than a ReactJS site" mentality has to die.

Elaborate on the "low in readability and overall UX". It loaded fast, and didn't use a cpu intensive client side animation that doesn't add to readability. It's not a paragon of design, but it was refreshing to have a single page of text that didn't download a few mbs in libraries and css, have constant tracking requests, or have animations or visualization that didn't add to my understanding of the content.

> Elaborate...

- Arbitrarily changing text effects/color/padding.

- Not responsive. On my laptop, I have to scroll left/right to see all pics

- Nav is below the fold, I have to scroll down to see it.

- Broken text hover effects

Sure, it doesn't track you or download 100 js files, but you can't score a site based on what it doesn't have.

> it doesn't track you or download 100 js files, but you can't score a site based on what it doesn't have.

Well judging by the positive reaction by a non-negligible number of people, the lack of javascript bloat may be something valued by many on this site.

Your points are well taken. It's not a well designed site, but to play devil's advocate I hardly noticed the need to scroll right (focus was on text) and didn't notice the text hover effect issue. Nav being below fold was largely immaterial because more information of interest was on the single page.

Are you looking at the same site as everyone else? Try going to the rest of the http://arkhaven.org/ site? Thd web design combines the worst of late nineties fonts, javascript and design. And as for the content...! Fundamentalist christian prepper mystical conspiracy minded internet kookery on the high end of the scale o_O

2/10 - Would not recommend emulating in next side project

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.

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.

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

https://caverntechnologies.com

Data centers have plenty of options for where they could be built without having to trash a unique natural space.

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/

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/

Doesn't look like there's any major fiber that goes through that area.

It would cook whatever ecosystem is there. Better to just dig a man made cave somewhere else.

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