Next up in our #EmployeeSpotlight series, meet Staff Engineer, Taylor Vergin!

Taylor graduated from Michigan Technological University in 2016 with a Bachelor of Science in Geological Engineering and a Minor in Mining. Taylor has experience performing a wide variety of field tasks and has been a major part of ERG’s expanding Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Modeling services.

1. What made you decide on Reno as the place to relocate?  

   For an outdoorsperson like myself, Reno has it all. In less than an hour’s drive, I can be in the Sierra Nevada hiking, camping, skiing, or fly-fishing or in the high desert mountain biking, mineral collecting or investigating mining ghost towns. The amount of exploring available in a weekend trip is nearly limitless. The city itself (while still fairly small) is growing rapidly and there is always something going on downtown during the weekend.

   
   

2. What is your favorite place you visited? 

   Ever since I visited there in summer 2019, I’ve been obsessed with Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwestern Montana. Combined with the adjacent Great Bear and Scapegoat Wilderness areas, it is the third largest wilderness complex in the lower 48 states. Only accessible by foot or horseback, it is truly a wilderness, with rugged peaks, beautiful rivers, and great fishing. While it is near Glacier National Park, it is rare to see other people while backpacking and is a great place to get away. 

    

3. What is a favorite project of yours since working at ERG and why?

   My favorite project at ERG to date was a chlorinated solvent site in northern Oakland County, Michigan. It was a complex site with multiple aquifers, complicated hydrogeology, vapor intrusion issues, and even bedrock (which is an extremely rare occurrence in Southeast Michigan). In order to best manage all the data at this complicated site, we were able to incorporate new software at ERG, including ArcGIS Pro, Rockworks, and Logplot. Learning all this new software has allowed it to become a main role of mine at ERG and something I really enjoy!

4. What is the most interesting, weird, or memorable thing that's happened to you while in the field? 

While in the field at our RACER Davison site, I experienced probably one of the cooler things I’ve seen while environmental sampling (I’ll admit that there isn’t a lot of competition, however). A creek runs through a portion of the site and we were conducting sampling of the groundwater as it discharges into the creek. It was just after a very rainy period, so the creek was high and conditions on the land were generally “swampy”. We pushed our sampling equipment into a sand lens below the creek that was known to produce groundwater and, to our surprise, water began to shoot out of the sampler similar to a drinking fountain. Apparently, there was enough surface water recharging the groundwater in that area that the sand lens had entered a flowing artesian state. In addition to this being a pretty interesting hydrogeologic occurrence, it also made for some of the easiest sampling you could ask for, with no pumping required.

5. What is something interesting about you that people may not know?

While it might not come as a surprise to people who know how nerdy I am (or be considered interesting), I’m a huge fan of science fiction/fantasy novels. My favorite series are the Wheel of Time, the Dark Tower series, and the Lord of the Rings.