As a child he moved to Los Angeles and Atlanta before settling back in Dayton where he graduated from Centerville High School in 1966.

[12] In 1977, he also co-led three expeditions to Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore Sistema Huautla, a cave system first discovered in 1965, and considered the deepest in the Western Hemisphere.

[13] Continuing to explore caves throughout the United States, Steele led and participated in expeditions to Sistema Huautla in Mexico almost every year through the 1980s.

[15][16] In 2014, Steele helped to form the Proyecto Espeleologico Sistema Huautla (PESH), an official project of the National Speleological Society and the United States Deep Caving Team.

[17] The mission of PESH is to explore, survey and conduct a comprehensive speleological study of the Sistema Huautla area caves.

[24][25][26] Steele led a major speleological expedition to Sistema Huautla in southern Mexico, covered in June 2018 by National Geographic.

[27] In May 2019 Steele led the way in making significant new discoveries in the popular Texas show cave Natural Bridge Caverns, the first new passages found in nearly 60 years.

[28][29][30] In October 2022 a feature article was published about Steele’s contemporary cave exploration projects, written by a popular Texas outdoor writer.