Abe,
I have worked and performed my SSURGO for the state of New Mexico because I work for NRCS. Before I give you how to do the steps, I ran the internet and found this and this pdf will probably be very useful for you. This is similar what I did.
Tutorial for SSURGO download from Purdue
You will probably need to go to
NRCS Geospatial Data Gateway to select all or some soil survey area spatial and tabular SSURGO soils data. This might charge you since you are not part of USDA employee or any Federal agency. You might check that out with the California NRCS for further information. If you know someone or an organization that might have the data and get copy of it.
Once you download all of the spatial and tabular from the data mart. Open the MS Access that you save the template database. You will probably see a warning dialog box and be sure to enable it. Make sure you make a copy and back it up in the event you messed it up.
Before you start importing all the database, it is wise to save a new MS Access database file like this for example SSURGO_CA.mdb.
When you import a database, the easiest way to do is to open the Window Explorer and copy the path of the tabular folder and paste it (on page 8) in the SSURGO Import dialog box. It save me a lot of my time. When it is done imported, make sure you save it as a SSURGO_CA.mdb for each tabular you download.
If you forgot or not sure which soil survey area you have import or not, you can open the access file and look for the names you have imported it there.
Let me know if you need help, Wish you the best luck !