2024 NSS Luminary Series – Louise Hose
NSS 13138 RL FE.
A Triad of Speleo Science Contributions.
Born in 1952 in Los Angeles as the third daughter of working-class parents who never attended college, a life of cave exploration and academics was not Louise’s obvious path. It was a trajectory filled with many obstacles. Her frugal parents took to the outdoors for every family vacation and weekend excursion. She first camped at three months and first backpacked when she was five. These experiences, along with a lot of luck and serendipity, overwhelmed the odds and led to a full and satisfying speleo-life.
Speleo Contribution 1: Caving and Exploration
College wasn’t in the family plans, but tuition-free California State University, Los Angeles opened its campus a couple of miles from home and Louise attended. As a freshman, she took two geology classes to meet the science requirement and joined the outdoors club. Caving was one of their core activities and Louise quickly immersed herself in caving by going on trips, practicing vertical techniques and attending Southern California Grotto meetings. She took another geology class to learn basic geologic mapping skills. But, when she went to the department chair to declare a geology major, he told her, “…you will never get a job as a geologist. Mining and oil companies will not hire women.” Her working-class sensibilities couldn’t justify getting an impractical degree, so she succumbed to expectations, earned a secondary education degree, married, and moved to Arizona.
During her early caving, she was surrounded by people who expected every serious caver to be good at just about everything. Within weeks of joining the grotto, Louise was doing vertical caves, helping with surveying and photography, and learning cave geology. Conservation ethics were pounded in. Her first husband, Tom Strong, introduced her to Grand Canyon caving, and they dedicated about 30 days a year to exploring there. Donald G. Davis, Mark Grady and Fred Wefer came into her life. These brilliant men treated her as an equal, and taught her how to “science the shit out of this” cave stuff.
Speleo Contribution 2: Getting Serious About Science
Louise’s contributions to cave science started with making geologic inventories and detailed trip reports on the Grand Canyon caves she visited. In 1977, the world was changing. Women started working as geologists. Louise returned to college for a masters. Her thesis covered the geology and hydrology of Sistema Purificación in Mexico. Articles in peer-reviewed publications announced her as a serious cave geologist. A move to the Denver area led to friendships with two more brilliant cave mentors, Norm Pace and Jim Pisarowicz. They convinced her that she could accomplish more than she had imagined for herself, which led her to pursue a geology doctorate.
In the 1980s, speleology received very little respect in mainstream science, and Louise decided to focus her dissertation on a more “acceptable” topic. She returned to cave exploration and science several years later after accepting a position as a professor in Colorado Springs. Locally, the hypogenic caves of Williams Canyon and the nearby granite caves drew her interest. She also headed back to Mexico.
She joined six expeditions to Oaxaca, Mexico, and helped link several caves into Sistema Cheve. The caving there seemed the perfect mix for her skills, but the most attractive element was the area’s unmapped geology. In 1993, she received a National Geographic Society (NGS) grant that supported geologic mapping and, using the new technology of precision (differential) GPS. While not traversed by people, she demonstrated that the Cheve Cave System is the deepest in the world.
For years, Jim Pisarowicz had tried to convince Louise to visit Cueva de Villa Luz in Mexico, and she finally made the trip in 1997. Immediately recognizing the spectacular, scientific value of the cave, she put together a multidisciplinary team of speleologists to visit the cave. She convinced NGS to sponsor work at Villa Luz. The cave is so novel, that soon media from around the world made trips to report on the work. Most prominent among the media, NGS ran a feature article. The new scientific understanding of active sulfuric acid speleogenesis and how organisms can exploit this environment was revolutionary.
Speleo Contribution 3: Always Giving Service
Hopefully, every serious caver finds ways to serve caves and our community. A sampling of Louise’s service includes grotto officer in six states, Vice-President of the 2009 International Congress of Speleology, leadership for four NSS conventions, NSS Board of Governors member for six years, Executive Director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute, and the Journal of Cave and Karst Studies editor-in-chief for eight years. She currently serves as Treasurer and Grant Committee Chair for the National Speleological Foundation.
A swan song? The Dream Team, 2022 to 2024
Louise, now in her 70s, continues pursuing cave science. Since May 2022, she has been exploring and documenting caves in eastern Nevada as part of the Wild Cave Project “Dream Team” hired by Great Basin National Park and Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. She is currently writing reports on 45 caves. Her contributions to the project include demonstrating that some of the caves are more than 11 million years old. While physically unable to visit some sites, one cave she visited several times last year required 60 m of vertical work, with numerous rebelays and redirectionals. She says when the body can’t handle the serious caving anymore, there are still loads of data to “science the shit out of.”
