A Sign?

Two days in and 500 feet down, our well was trickling less than one tenth of a gallon per minute. I can cry more water than that. Another 100 feet? Two hundred feet? Brian Shelton, our contractor, talked us through the options and what we decided concurred with what he said he'd do if it were his. We'd go another hundred feet but no more, not unless there was abundant evidence that they were close to a breakthrough. Here we were, a thousand miles away and $10,000 in the hole (pun intended) and nothing.

The next evening Brian called to report no improvement after the additional 100 feet. And here came my personal liability of being willing to believe, just a bit, in signs and portents. And water witching. I had felt the tug on that willow stick standing over the spot where they'd dug that well. Steve, our water witcher, had admitted that he'd had a few failures, but they were less than 1% of the wells he'd divined. Was this a sign? We knew we were pushing the financial envelope a bit by building this cabin, but were we pushing against something else?

There was another thing to try with this same hole. Black Mountain Drilling had the capability to do hydrofracturing, treating areas of the well hole with high pressure to loosen up and flush out cracks the granite it had gone through. There's almost always some improvement, though it can be minimal. We had to have at least half a gallon per minute to recharge the 600 foot deep well that would hold 800 gallons of water. So long as there were no major droughts we might be okay. It was expensive, but no more than going down another couple of hundred feet, and more likely to resolve the problem. Up where our cabin site is, at 8,600 feet in the Rocky Mountains, you're not hoping to hit a cavern of water, you're hoping to bisect veins of water that travel though fissures in the rock far below.



It was a long weekend, waiting for Monday's hydrofrac'ing. We didn't jump the gun by calling Brian for a report before he could call us. We were a bit gun shy at this point and starting to think about cisterns and roof catchment, something very familiar to me from my Caribbean days, but certainly not desirable. When the phone rang I was almost afraid to pick up. Brian's voice was flat; he'd been losing more sleep over this than we had. "Well, we couldn't get you half a gallon." Standing in the kitchen with Brian on speaker phone, I reached out and took hold of the counter for support -- my feet felt like they'd turned to stone and a cloud of doom was gathering in the high ceiling overhead.

"But I could get you SEVEN gallons!" Stone feet danced, that doom cloud vanished, and there was whooping and hollering on both ends of the phone. Brian said it was the second best improvement Black Mountain Drilling had ever seen, from a few gallons per day to seven gallons per minute. They tried for hours to empty that 600 foot column of water with a powerful pump so they could get an accurate estimate of the output, but they could never get it down more than 100 feet from the surface. The water is running fast and clear and sweet.

I'm taking it as a sign.

Well deserved excitement...

We've been at the point in the cabin project where there's been a lot going on behind the scenes, but not much we were directly involved in. Not that I've been idle. Far from it. I've done my bit to stimulate the economy by shopping on Ebay for some treasures to make the new cabin a home with a feeling of history from the get-go. I believe I'm single-handedly responsible for driving up the cost of vintage hammered aluminum housewares, not to mention depression glass, old Colorado souvenirs, and a wall light so old it needs rewiring.

I had jumped on getting our well permit ASAP in October, an interesting exercise in and of itself. With a BS in Geography, the required Township and Range information rang a bell, but I couldn't find any online maps or info about what ours might be. Luckily I had our Easting and Westing data stored in our hand held GPS -- precise latitude and longitude coordinates. Proposed maximum pumping rate? Annual amount to be withdrawn in acre-feet? Total depth? Aquifer? After speaking with a very helpful man at the Colorado Division of Water Resources I learned the answers to those four questions were 15 gallons per minute, one third of an acre foot, 500 feet, and granite respectively. Oh, and our Township is 11S and Range is 70W. We received word that we'd gotten our well permit while we were in Hawaii for our fifth anniversary, and it was one of the most exciting moments we had there, and that's saying something.

Our contractor, Brian Shelton, has made many trips to our land with earth movers and well diggers. He called tonight just as we were finishing dinner and deep into a bottle of Spanish Jumilla, a red wine that sounds way fancier than it is -- we're on a budget. Brian announced that they'd been clearing snow and doing the necessary work to the drive and were going to dig us a well starting on Wednesday! I wasn't nervous about that until he talked about how nervous he'd been when they'd dug their well from over a thousand miles away. We did take his hard-learned advice and hired a water witcher, and I am a believer (see water witching post below). Before the end of the week we should know the outcome and see just how close we came to those "proposed" amounts we filled in on the well application. The good news is that the weather is allowing this work and that it appears the road and site prep will come in under budget, leaving us wiggle room in case something comes in over budget later (well issues or maybe some nicer tile in the kitchen and bath?).

Tomorrow they move the deck and the trailer to a flat spot on the saddle, the place we'll call home when we go up this spring to lend a hand with the finish work. Once we can get a certificate of occupancy for the cabin we'll put the trailer up for sale and begin enjoying running water, indoor plumbing, and a wood burning stove among many other things. Being there during some of the construction is important from a personal standpoint. My husband especially wants to be a part of the build, just as he was over 40 years ago with the original cabin. Deciding to move ahead with the cabin now, before he's retired, was difficult only in that we'd miss some of the construction. Even now it's hard not to be there, to see trailer moved off the building site and the drill rig set up shop. The next time we see the land there will be a cabin sitting on it.


Stay tuned for the outcome on the well...