This is our second day
of practice in Missouri, We are starting
to get the hang of those silty clay loam textures. The day is bright and clear and the fog that was here yesterday is missing. Most students grab some breakfast and we are
on our way to Ravenwood, which is 8 miles east of Maryville by 7:45 am. We stop for coffee as the HyVee has Caribou
Coffee in the gas station, or so the sign says.
It is better than the Holiday Inn Express but not quite up to regular
Caribou standards. We arrive at our site
which is still in the shade so we set up work in the sun. I divide the gang into two teams of five for
this soil and they get started. The pit
is muddy in the bottom so boots are required by those who want get close to the
pit face. This soil at practice pit 9 is
developed in glacial till. There are
lots of rocks to verify the till.
Horizons are similar to yesterdays and so are the soil’s textures. Both groups do an adequate job of describing
this Hapludalf, or Alfisol due to the thin Ap and light colored Bt1 that is
directly under the Ap.
Practice site 10 is down the hill from here and while it has similar horizons it is developed entirely in loess. The lower horizons are silty clays with 49 % clay the highest clay content we have seen. We did this site in teams of 3. We break for lunch and stop in Ravenwood for a restroom at the local filling station and only store in town. We travel the 3 miles to our next ranch that raises horses, dogs and a few cows. The sites are through the farmyard of barking dogs and into the horse pasture. Later one of the horses tries to knock me into the trunk of our van while I am trying to get something out. We eat our lunch under the shade of some osage orange trees and by 12:30 are starting practice pit 12. I use this pit as an individual pit so I can see how they are doing. Lewis and Andrea are the high alternates followed closely by Stephanie. Melissa is the overall winner and the coach owes her a drink at the pub. We will do one more individual pit on Wednesday for the final determination of the team of four. This pit is also all in glacial till another Hapludalf. The last horizon is a Btss or has slickensides, or peds smearing against one another due to the 45% clay content. This we don’t see much of in Minnesota.
Our final pit 11 was a mixed up mess (according to Coach Cooper) so I had them do it all together as a practice for the team judging. The pit was an Argiaquoll, but that call needs to be debated at the coaches meeting. We arrived back in town at 3:45 and they had 2 hours before we left for dinner.
Wednesday is another practice day, though we will need to cut it short for some badly need time for homework.
Coach Cooper
