NSS 2025 Luminary - Jim Pisarowicz

Seems As If All the Decisions in My Life Were Because I Am a Caver.

NSS 16872 FE, LB. Explorers Club FN 1979. It seems that I have been interested in caves for my entire life. I remember going into a sandstone cave with my sister and cousin in the St. Paul, Minnesota area when I was 4 years old. As a grew older, I would ride my bicycle to places in the Twin Cities where I had found out there were caves. As a Boy Scout, my fellow scouts and I would seek out and explore caves. Unfortunately, Minnesota is not a state with extensive cave resources, so it was a number of years until I was reintroduced to caving.

Eventually I connected with the NSS. It seemed that all my old caving friends had moved on to other activities or places, but I still wanted to go caving.

As such, I joined the Colorado Grotto in the early 1970s. Most cavers did not own a wetsuit, as I did because I was a diver. That led to my being involved in the exploration of Spring Cave, Colorado, involving multi-sump diving. After that project, the rest, as they say, is history. My caving spread across the United States, down into Mexico and Central America, and eventually overseas to Papua New Guinea. In 1990, I was awarded the NSS’s highest award for cave exploration, the Lew Bicking Award.

After finishing graduate school and experiencing some personal tragedies, I left my academic career to start working as a park ranger with the National Park Service at Wind Cave National Park. There I led the exploration team to survey the cave’s 40th mile (1984) and beyond. Today, Wind Cave is the 7th longest cave in the world at over 154 miles long. I also worked for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to develop Mystery Cave in southeast Minnesota as a show cave. Further work in National Parks led me to become the Executive Director of the Death Valley National Park cooperation association and caving in the Death Valley area and other parts of the world.

I have published hundreds of articles on caving. I was one of the initial editors of the Journal of Cave and Karst Studies (JOCKS) where I served as its co-editor for 11 years. I have also worked as a co-editor of several issues of the AMCS Activities Newsletter. I founded and directed the NSS’s Caves of Tabasco Project and its groundbreaking exploration and research in Cueva de Villa Luz, and its chemo-autotropic ecosystem.

I eventually returned to academia. I have worked as a professor of psychology/math/statistics at Antioch University, Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University), and Sinclair Community College in Ohio.

An award-winning wildflower photographer, publishing two books of Colorado wildflowers with co-author, Mary Menz (Common Wildflowers of the San Juan Mountains and Wildflowers of Colorado’s Western Slope). My photos have appeared in US News & World Reports, Time, New Scientist, Weekly Reader, and various other publications, textbooks and field guides. I have published in excess of 15,000 images.

I live in Montrose on Colorado’s west- ern slope with my wife Karen Rosgand 3 agility dogs.