Deliberate vandalism, like the spraypaint graffiti seen here, causes cavers to not trust the general public.
It is the policy of the National Speleological Society and chapters such as the Front Range Grotto not to distribute cave location information. Since the beginnings of organized caving in the United States, secrecy regarding cave locations has been used as a strategy to protect caves. The threats from which organized cavers seek to protect caves include vandalism, littering, harvesting of minerals, disturbance of cave-dwelling organisms, overuse, rescues involving inexperienced visitors, and disruption of landowner relations. Caves can take tens of thousands of years to form and their more delicate features can easily be destroyed by a single careless or malicious act. Secrecy has been a useful tool for protecting caves in the United States, particularly here in the west where many caves are on public land.
Rather than handing out cave locations to anyone who asks, organized cavers generally like to get to know the person first. We like to see how you behave in a cave. We like knowing whether or not you can be safe and practice minimum impact caving. Those are the skills, knowledge, and ethics we can pass along to newer cavers, and that is one of the primary reasons that grottos like the FRG exist. People do not generally harm caves out of spite, but rather because they do not understand what unusual environments caves are. After caving with a grotto for a while, newcomers are often amazed at how much they learned in a short time, and how many opportunities they have to go caving.
As the world changes, we realize that secrecy is going to be a less and less useful tool for protecting caves. Instead, education will be the best strategy for protecting caves. As more that people understand how caves are beautiful, fragile, and important, the safer that caves will be. A nice overview of the topic can be found in this brochure.
A single careless act could destroy a formation like the Bottlebrush