BOARD02623

• Board Meeting Date: 8/1/1974
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

I

I

vegetation. The white areas do contain some vegetation, primarily,
sage brush. A very indifferent and unproductive soil I guess you
could say, because the soil has been literally all eroded off in
the rock at this point and you have little vegetation at all. Only
on the north and east slope do you see shrubs and trees. In short,
we feel we can increase the productivity and the wildlife carrying
capacity in Davis Gulch by quite a bit.

(slide) Now here is a slide we put together listing the total number
of studies that we have done on the Colony property since 1969. They
total 113 studies. Twenty-four in air quality, 17 related to water,
6 plans mine related, 9 pipeline, and so forth and so on. It looks
like an enormous number of studies and yet when you take a feature
like water you have such a thing as the water consumption and the
mining dust control, for example, and crushing control and pretty
soon the number increases a great deal.

(slide) Taking one aspect of revegetation. Our program began back in
1965 actually, and has continued with roughly a new cropping every
year or so. As we found out certain things we had to establish a
new plot to find out new things. We feel'very confident. now in oUr
revegetation work. We can grow native species in shale.

(slide) This is one of our early plots called the boxed plot estab-
lished in 1967 with grass, cr~ted wheat grass. When the picture
was taken it had existed four years without water, without supple-
mental water or fertilizers. It is now six years and it looks very
much the same. Other species fell by the wayside as you can see 'by
some of the empty spots.

(slide) These two pictures illustrate what plants do in processed
shale with and without fertilizer.

(slide) This is without fertilizer.

(slide) This is with fertilizer.

(slide) You can see that without fertilizer the species on the left
is doing fairly well, but I assure you that it won't make it for
long.

(slide) The shale has to be leached before you can get growth like
that and that was the case in the 1968 plot here by the plant. It
has to be mulched.

(slide) And here it is. I like to poke fun at my engineering friends.
How did they get that fertilizer spread on there in such bad shape?
You can see the dark green where they obviously got a lot of nitro-
gen into it, and the white color there is a difference. I think
that kind of growth would satisfy us on our own lawns.

-6-