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.