I came in to work today to find absolutely no one in the office. Its never a good sign when you walk in and there is a dark office ahead of you. After talking to one of the RCD employees, I found out Rich was still out on a field visit. I decided to work on some homework to use my time I had available, but I realized that without access to the computer there was very little I could do without Rich around. Because it is a Federal office, all the computers are password protected and despite being a registered volunteer, I do not have a computer login.
Once Rich arrived with Jim, our engineer, I got to work on creating a handful of soil maps. The interesting thing about this job has always been you never see the same thing twice. Each place is different, each problem is a new problem. Rich always says that's why he never tried to get a promotion, he never gets bored working in the field. Anyway, there is a certain aspect of problem solving that always gets me excited. Even soil maps which I should be a pro at by now, are always a new task to face. When you have no farm number or tract number, its impossible to know exactly where someones property line is. I usually pull up google maps and the soil map and by using the given acreage and the fuzzy outlines of properties google provides I can usually infer where my boundaries should be drawn. But there have definitely been times where the information just doesn't match up and its those times that I remind myself to do the best I can with what is given to me.
After completing my maps, Rich and I headed not far from the office for a few field visits. Once we got to the neighborhood, we met with a county employee. Turns out that all the properties on that street were against a creek. Their property lines were against county property on the creek sides and the banks were experiencing landslides. Now since the end of March, almost every field visit I've seen has been the same; they have all been landslides. A lot of Santa Cruz county has some serious slopes with natural soil, compared to where I grew up in flat suburbia covered in concrete. While this is good in allowing more water to permeate into soil, it also results in landslides. The problem in this case was that it was occurring on county land but the problem was from natural causes on the private land owners. Due to a lot of the private property not managing their runoff, it allowed for too much water to enter the county's property and destabilized the bankside. Almost in every case we've seen, the water oversaturated the topsoil and then hit a clay layer in which it could no longer penetrate and then slid off the clay layer. The properties we saw were in danger from the slides because once a slide occurs it will try to stabilize which usually involves moving up the slope where the properties were. Mostly, there needed to be some french drains or some way of collecting the water to stop it from heading directly for the slope.
After seeing four properties lining the creek, we went back to the office where Rich came up with an idea for a project to work on. Because he hadn't been there to give me access to the computer and he believed he was repeating a lot of solutions for similar projects that I should create folders to address certain land issues. These would include necessary publications to share, information such as cover crops etc, and a solutions letter. I worked the rest of the day making the letters I had previously worked on more generic. This included generalizing the farming on a slope letter, the landslide letter, and the horse facility letter.
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