Recon of Cache Creek

Hey Everyone,

I spent Thursday and Friday up in Cache Creek checking the place out. I drove by the Cache Creek Settling Basin, although there wasn't much to look at except trees and bushes. About 99% of the water in the creek gets diverted at Capay into two canals, one heads north and one heads south, and by the time the rest of the water reaches the CCSB it isn't flowing any more. The Cache Creek is surprisingly big and powerful, usually at least 50 feet across, several feet deep, and moving quick. It's not nearly as fun to swim in as I was hoping for. On my adventures I saw a bald eagle, two golden eagles (one on Sulphur Creek), a blue heron, 2 red tail hawks, dozens of turtles including three in Harley Gulch next to the old gaging station, lots of cliff swallows, bear sign, and everything else. The region is almost impossible to walk around due to thick chamise growing almost everywhere, mixed in with oaks, pines, manzanita, and poison oak. Luckily, there are a handful of old fire roads and trails to follow

Where Harley Gulch meets highway 20 I ran into Janis Cooke and Roberto Cervantes from the Central Valley Water Board. Janis is the one who put together the TMDL report for Harley Gulch, and seems to be the one managing Harley Gulch issues for the CVWB.
Janis Cooke: (916)464-4672, jcooke@waterboards.ca.gov.
Roberto Cervantes: (916)464-4682
I talked to them for awhile, and they weren't aware of us or our research. They recommended I read both the TMDL report and the Tetra Tech report to get a better idea of samples that have been taken and possible remediation solutions for the different sites. Not reading those reports it was kinda difficult to have an informed conversation, but Janis said that mercury is pretty much an erosion control issue since it binds to the sediment, unlike other toxic metals. I was going to email her later and ask for any spreadsheets or data on sampling that she has or knows of. It seems like there are so many organizations collecting data and it is going to be easy to miss some.

From the intersection of Harley Gulch and Cache Creek to Abbott Mine, there were 14 mercury samples taken very recently, probably within the last week. Janis said that was probably the responsible party, aka the company that owns the Abbott Mine is monitoring how affective their cleanup was. I'm hoping to get that data, but I have no idea who to contact and what the monitoring plan is. We have to do our project with the BLM within the context of existing plans, which requires a really good understanding of what those plans are and how BLM fits into everything.

The erosion control project on the Abbott mine appears to be working well, and everything is covered in a fairly thick layer of grass. There is a lot of exposed rock at all the other mines I saw though including Turkey Run, Manzanita, and Central. It's going to be interesting to calibrate the WARMF model for Harley Gulch because of the Abbott Mine cleanup, and trying to calibrate it using very little information and assumptions about how much the cleanup helped with erosion control.

If people want to check out my photos, I put them here: G:\Photos\2010 June Cache Creek
They are also georeferenced: G:\Photos\June CCB.kmz, but remote desktop does not have Google Earth.

My forest service job doesn't start for another week, so I'll be around SB with plenty of time on my hands.

-Nick