  Near-extremal black holes are obtained by exciting the Ramond sector of the
D1-D5 CFT, where the ground state is highly degenerate. We find that the dual
geometries for these ground states have throats that end in a way that is
characterized by the CFT state. Below the black hole threshold we find a
detailed agreement between propagation in the throat and excitations of the
CFT. We study the breakdown of the semiclassical approximation and relate the
results to the proposal of gr-qc/0007011 for resolving the information paradox:
semiclassical evolution breaks down if hypersurfaces stretch too much during an
evolution. We find that a volume V stretches to a maximum throat depth of V/2G.
