FOUR PROFILES

Now that I've introduced you to some of the faces at this year's NSS convention. I want you to meet four people in particular that I got to know and found amazing some of the things they have done.

First is Emily Davis from upstate New York. Emily has been caving 37 years and is a captain of a cave rescue unit. Several years ago Davis was with an expedition group in 1991 in the famous Lechuguilla Cave in Mexico doing a mapping project. During a rope climb a large rock fell from the ceiling and slammed into Davis's knee, leaving it broken at the joint. Davis, who is now 57, had to be removed from the cave during a 4 1/2 day rescue operation. Ninety people underground and 70 others on the surface worked both night and day to slowly move Davis from the cave. You might think that Davis would have been scared she was going to die in the cave but that wasn't the case. She was more upset that the accident forced the end of the expedition to move her out. Now she's looking forward to being inside a cave when her 60th birthday rolls around.

Now I want you to meet Dr. Hazel Barton, who is originally from England but now works with Northern Kentucky University as a professor of microbiology. Dr. Barton is one of those people who likes looking for the tiniest of creatures that might be found in a cave. When you find her underground you'll most likely see her with a stack of sterile dishes to keep the specimens she's collecting. But it was one cave in particular that she was in that amazed me the most.

I don't remember the name of it but it is located near Denver, Colorado. Inside the temperature was a very hot 120 degrees and she needed special waders to handle 127 degree water pooled up in the area she was in. The oxygen level was a very low 12 percent and humidity was a whopping 99 percent. To add to all this displeasure, sulfuric acid dripped from the ceiling.

"You could only spend ten minutes at a time inside there," she said. But the big thing was there millions of microbes inside the cave making it a microbiologists dreamland. Barton described it as like being inside someone's intestines. Not the kind of thought I like at the dinner table for sure. Barton, who also works for a phamaceutical company said that some cave microorganisms create their own antibodies that might one day be used to cure some of our ills. Hopefully she'll find something to clean out the worst of them.

This is Bill Cuddington from Moulton, Alabama. Bill is 73 years young and considered the godfather of vertical climbing with 55 years of experience. If you need advice or help in the real learning of the ropes this is the man you want to go see. He and his wife Mariam have made thousands of climbs all over the country. Sometimes they'll rope down into a hole or off a cliff just so they can climb back out of it. Both competed in this year's climbing competition at the convention and Mariam, who is 64, set a new world record for her age group covering 94 feet vertically in 81 seconds. They've both climbed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park on several occasions. Neither one plans on giving up the sport anytime soon. As long as their legs are working for them they plan to go find as many places as they can to drop a rope off of. Oh...and don't call them experts either. "There are no experts," Bill said. "You have to be just as careful on the 10,000th climb as you do the first. If you make one mistake you're gone no matter how long you've been climbing."

Now think of crawling in a passageway where molten rock used to flow through long ago, where temperatures of more than 3,000 degrees would turn you into a cinder in a millisecond if you came in contact with it. These are some of the places New Zealander Jansen Cardy has visited during some of his caving expeditions. Cardy and his wife have the uniqueness of travelling all over the country as she works as a contract nurse, going from hospital to hospital. This allows Jansen some time to do mapping projects in caves all over the United States. One of those opportunites landed him on Hawaii where he has mapped ancient lava tubes in the different volcanic systems there. You might ask why but there really is a practical use for it. If you live anywhere in Hawaii and you own property and want to build a house it's best if you know whether or not you have a large, underground chasm under where you plan to build. The rock in a tube can sometimes be very fragile and a bulldozer can easily go crashing in threatening both the life of the operator and the loss of the dozer as well. You also don't want to have your house sitting on top of a tube as an earthquake (and Hawaii is always shaking) can send your house crashing toward the center of the Earth. Cardy said his biggest worry was more about earthquakes and the tube crashing in on him than lava piercing the tube once more. After being asked about it, though, he said he might have to think about that a little harder.