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percolates into the soil before most of it evaporates. Fortunately, many of the soils on <br />reclaimed land have a silty to sandy texture and therefore capillary rise of soil moisture <br />to the surface is not very effective. This is advantageous as it limits increased salinity <br />of near surface soils and the production of surface pans that greatly limit plant growth <br />and diversity. That requires a much more clayey soil than is found in the reclamation <br />soils at Coal Creek. So even though reverse illuviation is not occurring, illuviation <br />isn't either because evaporation for the last several years has almost always exceeded <br />precipitation. A wet Spring or Fall can help a lot, but in the last decade those have <br />been rare and strong thunderstorms in the summer do more erosional damage to the <br />soil than helping with soil development. <br />Recent cattle grazing has had no apparent impact. <br />Exploration Reclamation Status: Prior to the lease being amended a large exploration <br />program was conducted throughout the area proposed for leasing. Backhoe pits were excavated and <br />these created small disturbances of 100 to 200 square feet more or less 500 feet apart. Once sampling <br />of the materials was done the pits were backfilled and the original soil replaced. Seeding of the <br />disturbances was rarely needed as the soil was replaced quickly before the seed bank could degrade. <br />In most instances, a return to an approximation of the original vegetation occurred within 3 to 4 years. <br />Tumbleweed growth during the first couple of years was often robust but then vanished as is normal <br />in medium fertility soils such as these. After approximately ten years of growth the vegetation on the <br />exploration pits is only barely distinguishable from the surrounding undisturbed (by exploration) <br />vegetation. <br />In obtaining the release, a series of pits were selected from the exploration map without prior <br />inspection. These were selected to represent different environmental regimes as well as providing <br />fairly easy access to search for each site. Very few of the exploration sites were marked after they <br />were backfilled. Those that were marked by 4x4 posts were lost when the grazing lessee pulled out all <br />the posts because he didn't like them. However, all pits, whether marked or not, were mapped with an <br />accuracy of being within a circle about 25 feet in radius. Thus the pit location would be identified by a <br />more or less rectangular feature covering about 150 to 250 square feet. <br />Each mapped location selected was then very carefully examined in an attempt to identify the exact <br />location of the pit. In several instances the pits simply could not be found as the vegetation and <br />microtopography were indistinguishable from the surrounding land. In other instances a vague outline <br />of the pit could be seen and upon further examination of the vegetation structure in comparison to <br />surrounding areas as well as examining microtopographic features the location was verified. In all <br />cases, if one did not know what to look for the location of the pits would not be noticed. The <br />identification features are very vague, sometimes requiring one to crawl around on hands and knees <br />examining minute features that indicated prior disturbance. In a few instances the location of the pit <br />could not be found because prairie dogs had so thoroughly disturbed the area where the pit was <br />known to have been the pit location was invisible. When a pit location was found it was photographed <br />and the outline defined on the photograph. <br />After last year's annual report, the DRMS inspected the exploration pits. In some instances, the pit <br />location could not be relocated during the inspection because the vegetation patterns that revealed it <br />Status report for 2013 due July 15, 2013 Page 10 of 16 <br />