Landslide Victory

Evergreen Cemetery’s slide management

The rainy season cometh.  We danced for it, prayed for it, even voted to manage the water from it.  So when we get what we ask for, when Nature demonstrates the saying: “when it rains, it pours.”, expect our green hills to turn into mush and slide downward. 

Luckily, much Evergreen's hillsides are held together by joined crowns of lush redwoods. There are also  undulating tails of tall ferns and deep delving scented bay trees.  Hardened gnarled oaks tend to stay towards the bottom half. Occasionally, especially this time of year we are reminded that we have an oddball, flame colored deciduous wonder.
Enough rain in our quadrangle will best the most rooted of these hillside occupants, upending its trunk, sending the added weight to the slump of rock, clay, and sandstone, propelling the debris right into an old crypt or granite monument. 

Evergreen Cemetery has experienced numerous mudslides. In 1865, one such slide made the newspapers.  Cemetery volunteers, our first generation of “Evergreenies”, (the name we volunteers give ourselves today),  took on the challenge of Evergreen’s management with poetical humor, (if I read my 1865 counterpart correctly.)

  Today when you visit Evergreen, you can look straight up the main path to see trees and ivy. A lot of large trees are not holding their ground, but have collapsed, and been stacked by Nature, the high powered constituent in this race against ruin. In fact, in the two other gullies surrounding Evergreen, the debris looks human managed, stacked askew as if some giant played pick up sticks.  A sign on the main trail now to keep visitors safe, right before the Glory Path climbs up towards the top of Evergreen, to remind them that there is only one trail to use.
 In fact, the small hillside stream has already eroded away an empty plot. If it weren't for the single redwood standing guard up there, (with the help of some old wharf pilings put in back in the ‘70's), the whole section might slump down hill, again, this time taking a few headstone dense family plots with it.

In 1969, we were able to capture erosion in action at Evergreen:  

Creeped out?

In 1982, another landslide occurred. It happened during the famous storm, one that is forever recorded in a powerful picture book produced by the Santa Cruz Sentinel called “The Storm of ‘82”.  (This storm was also responsible for the Love Creek disaster.) Nature won this round against us.

In 2012, Engineers took a hard look at why landslides and flooding occurred at Evergreen. The hillside was slowly creeping downward. What trees clung to its sides leaned sideways like a human on a surfboard. This elegant solution was the result of this planning after many months of discussion and bids.

photos courtesy of G.Neier, Evergreen Archives

 The culvert  funnels water down this beautifully designed, channel shaped retaining wall. (complete with artistically placed stone pebbles within the water furrow..)  Flow heads straight into a large drain installed below the street.

Photo by G. Neier, Evergreen Volunteer

photo courtesy of G. Neier

Currents of Renewed Ambition

photo courtesy of D.White, Evergreen Volunteer

Cinder blocks for use on plot retaining wall

This isn’t the end. We are starting to shore up old plot retaining walls and with donations from the City of Santa Cruz, we are able to restore sections of Evergreen with recycled materials from local sources, replacing the first attempts by volunteers  to hold back the tide of mud and debris from further endangering the more delicate and historic sections of this living piece of local history. We may not ever win the race against Nature, but we can convince the landscape to work around us.

 Interested in helping out? Visit the Museum’s webpage .