3-3-11

Today was a great adventure...literally. I came to the office and we left to head into the Santa Cruz mountains. I thought it would be a 30 minute drive, but instead it was an hour long drive through the beautiful forests and then onto a ridge road filled with potholes, cliff edges, and mud that flew up higher than the car when we drove through. The truck was bouncing like crazy but the view was amazing. The property was on the edge of a hill looking out to the boardwalk, the lighthouse, all of west cliff, then east cliff, and all the way around from Watsonville to Monterey. I guess if you are going to face treachorous roads, it better be worth it. The client was super nice and was great to chat through as we trekked her long driveway.

The client was asking us to do a road walk. Her "driveway" was off the ridge road and led to a couple of different properties. The problem was that the road was unpaved and it had been raining so it was basically mud. The problem was "cut throughs" making ruts in the road because the side of the road were higher so the road was the lowest point. There was also runoff from the driveways onto the main driveway. They had been putting gravel down, but it wasn't really working. There was a good thing already in place; there was a culvert at the low point, but not exactly where the lowest part is. The danger of a culvert at the lowest point is that the water will weaken the pipes and the driving over it will eventually crush it.

Rich recommended that they pave the portions where the road is the lowest point, but the best recommendation was to try to reduce the way water traveled on the road through grading the road better. The other thing we looked at was the effect of the 2008 fire that was in the Santa Cruz mountains. You could see how much had grown back and what was taking slower to repopulate. Also, there was a lot of the same type of plant, mostly a pine that needed fire for the seed bank to fertilize.

We then drove a different way out and I got to see another part of Santa Cruz I had never seen before. It was very tropical looking and secluded. There were some beautiful properties that these people had owned for generations. We also got to drive past a few of the properties I had been working on for the EQIP applications. Overall, an incredible day spent in the field.