Extraordinary Women Leaders in Speleology (EWLS)

Two 7700-year-old women were discovered in a far east Russia cave called Chertovy Vorota or the Devil’s Gate Cave in English. The site was of particular interest because the skeletons were found with pottery, harpoons, and the remnants of nets and mats woven from twisted blades of wild sedge grass; considered by many researchers a rudimentary form of early agriculture. Hungarian graduate student Veronika Siska was sequenced the genome to compare it to modern Europeans and Asians and revealed  an interesting link to modern culture. The two Devil’s Gate Cave women are related to the Ulchi, indigenous people live a few hundred kilometers north of the cave where they have long fished, hunted, and grown food and other people who speak the endangered 75 or so Tungusic languages spoken in eastern Siberia and China. Sources: Science Mag,  wiki commons

Shelly Colatskie has been a Cave Ecologist at Missouri Department of Conservation for 6 years. During this time she has worked with numerous caving and government organizations to preserve and study bats. She even worked with Missouri Bat Census , an organization founded by Kirsten Alvey-Mudd , an Extraordinary Woman Caver.  In February 2017 she received the G. Andy Runge Wildlife Award for the Missouri Department of Conservation from the Missouri Chapter of the Wildlife Society for making the Sodalis Nature Preserve in Hannibal a reality. The mine passages provide hibernation habitat to at least 168,000 Indiana bats, which is one-third of all the Indiana bats known to exist. Sources: KHMO ,  USFWS/Ann Froschauer

Nicole Davis was chosen to be featured in the  Extraordinary Women Cavers Guidebook and Magazine  for along side several other extraordinary women cavers in the 2017 August release of the annual publication. Nicole worked as a tour guide at Lewis and Clark Caverns during graduate school at Montana State University while earning her Master of Science in Earth Sciences when she fell into caving. While working on her fellowship in the Geology PhD program at the University of Cincinnati , she explored caves with the Greater Cincinnati Grotto and even took two one-month-long expeditions to study glaciers on Mt. Everest and Mt. Kailash in Tibet. Nicole became a cave mapper with the Dusty Cavers and Western Mappers and has participated cave maps, geology studies, and dozens of survey trips in Crystal, Buckelew and Scroll caves. She is also on the 2017 board of Southern Arizona Grotto (SAG). Welcome Nicole and congratulations on becoming an EWC! Photo by Jessica Pruitt