The information for one question I've attached a waypoint, but you can use any of the many pull outs along this small highway for your observations. There's no reason to cross the street if you're coming from the Santa Paula side as you can see everything from that side of the Road.
There is some interesting history with these oil producing hills. It all started back in the 1860's by Josiah Stanford seeing what you see today driving down the road, oil seeping from the hills. His brother a railroad baron (Leland) and he started digging tunnels using mostly Chinese labor.
Some of the tunnels they used a ditch dug into the floor of the tunnel, then covered that with boards for the oil to drain to the outside and still be able to wheel carts and walk into the mines. They graded the tunnels at one percent so they would drain to the entrance of the tunnel where the oil would be collected into pipes and then sent into trucks, carts etc. to move along.
Of course some of the problems of running a operation in the early days were explosions from the gas build ups. They even used mirrors and relected light into the mines (a lot were straight mines) instead of using the lamps to solve this. Progress solved all of these problems and the mining company's pumped oil into the 1990's.
The Oil produced around these parts comes from the shale's of the Miocene period, Monterey Formation. The oil normally is within the layers of Sandstone and Shale and comes out from between the laminate of these formations. This is also coming together with Sulphureted water. Most oil has a percent of Sulfur in them. It's a low percentage 2 to 3 percent range most of the time. In this area at the posted coordinates (DON'T STOP, THIS IS A DRIVEBY OBSERVATION BY YOUR NOSE!) you'll smell the sulfur as rotten eggs.
These oils were mostly found between 230 feet and 2300 feet deep. The oil API gravity in the Bridge pool, the largest in these fields is at 33 API. It has less Sulfur than the Sespe pool, here at 22 API, and a heigher level of Sulfur at almost 3%. Oils are rated using this API gravity number, if it's greater than 10 it is lighter and floats on water, if less than 10 it's heavier and sinks. This number was used by the Oil company's to calculate barrels of crude oil per metric ton, (i.e. an oil at 39.6 API would contain about 7.6 barrels).
E-Mail me the answers, do not post in the log!
1. Type in "GC5R4M9 Oil in them there hills!"
2. How many people in your group?
3. Go to waypoint 1. Look at the oil seeps, is the water floating on the oil or the other way around?
4. What does this tell you?
5. What are the seeps doing? (Bubbling, running, etc.) Is there any oil running along the gutter of the road?
6. At the coordinates for this Earthcache as you drive by (open your windows at least 1/4 mile before you get there. What do you smell (NO NEED TO STOP, USE YOUR NOSE!)
Reference material
Ojai chamber of commerce
Wikipedia
SJV Geology.org
CSUN Geology Department
HTTP://www.scvresources.com