June 2026 - Tom Wade

Yes.

And it's probably in some type of a – so there can be underground venues for water moving across your land.

And can you – sort of identify those places where water is moving underground on your place by the vegetation that ends up that you see on the surface?

I think the native vegetation can give you an idea of how surface water is infiltrating into your land.

Rock outcroppings can do the same thing.

Rock outcroppings are conduits to groundwater production.

How do you mean that?

Rock outcroppings typically have large pores, macro pores, we call them.

Insects like to make themselves busy around the edges of rocks.

And if you could imagine it's raining or snowing and that precipitation hitting that rock and sliding down the edges of it, when it hits the soil, it begins to slide down the rest of that rock underneath the soil.

The part

that's underground.

The part that's underground.

And then follow that rock until it's able to

Wow, so the water actually falls where that goes.

Yes.

So is that like how rock mulches work, where the impact of the water is coming down and it's hitting a group of rocks, but the rocks are stopping it from being erosive? Because you see on the side of the highway where they take all those giant rocks and they've cut the road and it's probably about a 45-degree angle.

And they put a bunch of riffraff rock up on that hill.

And are they doing that so that they don't get erosion? And how does the rock help with that?

In that situation, I don't know that those rocks that have been placed by human beings are really assisting infiltration.

They're out of their native environment.

They're on a very packed hillside that's meant to not collapse.

And so I wouldn't say that those rocks are contributing to groundwater infiltration.

It's more your native rocks.

Okay, so these are rocks where you're seeing, you know, the black lichen and everybody growing on top of them and they're just a rock outcropping.