The main reason I asked about the soil type in Moffat was to figure out whether SM's grave could have been dug by hand or whether it was rocky land and would have needed a stronger tool (bobcat) to dig even a shallow grave.
Thank you all for answering my question, there must have been soft soil in Moffat where Barry dug her grave by hand. He must have used the hand shovels to both dig and bury SM that he then brought to the Broomfield HIE.
I do believe he had theoretically planned Suzanne's murder in advance. He had listened to copious crime podcasts about murder. He had obviously researched how to erase data on his truck and bobcat. He had planned where to bury her.
The timing of their daughters weekend trip over Mother's Day weekend must have presented him with the perfect opportuntiy.
JMO
#JusticeForSuzanne
It was probably pretty crispy on top, not soft. It's sometimes called caliche (nature's own cement). It doesn't behave like the soils I"m more familiar with here in coastal California.
Out there, you can pour all the water you want into the land and it just sinks away like it does at the beach. It can be somewhat loose, with various sized rocks (pebbles, almost always some gravels, and bigger rocks too).
I would say that the top part of the land out there is kind of...crispy. Some of it is "hard pan," meaning that it is starting to feel more like rock, but you can easily chop it up with a pick or a hammer (we carry a geologist's hammer to look for fossils and rocks). Once you chop it, it's more like loose sand than dirt (as I usually think of dirt). Typically unfarmable, and in this case, mostly unlivable as well (no major housing takes place out that way, too difficult to supply water and utilities).
IME (living in a different desert), you try to shovel something and the sides of your dig cave in, but as more underground rocks are struck, it's possible to dig a trench, with the rocks helping to keep the sides from collapsing. In this case, four feet deep (and we do not know its other dimensions) was not enough to prevent animal scavenging.
Plant roots often form a kind of web or mat, as well. And this is from a little ways away, but shows the dirt better:
That light colored rocky stuff on top is...probably at least a foot or more thick - so it looks packed, but as you dig, it has a tendency to make for hard shoveling and you have to keep dealing with the edges of an excavation crumbling. If it's hard pan (like in this picture), you can kind of sculpt out a trench though. I haven't dug any graves out that way, but I have played archaeologist (on private land).
This helps explain why not much housing out there:
Tough going.
Part of Barry's work had to have been bringing in topsoil for certain projects (although he seems to have liked moving rocks and gravels around, grading, things like that).
It's my understanding that Salida (with its river) has had enough flooding from time to time, over years and years, to make it more like the dirt I'm familiar with.
