Article by Rayna Bailey
Water – March 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dave Knight, owner of Young’s Drilling, peered into the six-inch-wide opening of our well, pushed his red baseball cap farther back on his head and pointed toward a patch of dirt about five feet away. “Toss your checkbook over there,” he said, “and we’ll start drilling again.”
That was the second clue there was trouble in our secluded mountain paradise. The first had come several hours earlier when my husband, Pat, stepped into the shower stall, turned on the faucet and got hit with a sputtering burst of cold air rather than the expected warm water.
After a moment of confusion in the shower, Pat wrapped his unwashed body in a towel, put on his slippers and headed for the storage room to check the gauge on the well’s pressure tank. I was right behind him muttering, “I don’t get it. I had plenty of water for my shower. I even shaved my legs.” The words hung heavy between us as Pat glared first at the needle on the gauge, which had dropped to zero, then at me.
By the time Dave Knight arrived on the scene, we didn’t need him to tell us what we had already figured out. After only one week in our new home, our well had gone dry.
When Knight went to his truck, pulled a copper rod from a box on the seat, bent it into the shape of an L, took the short side in his hand, pointed it like a pistol and said, “Let’s try something, just for some ha-has,” as he paced around the well, I failed to see the joke.
Unwilling to trust a method for finding water based on myth rather than scientific evidence, I asked him how dependable dowsing is. He stopped pacing only long enough to glance at me and answer, “Well. You can pitch a hat out here.”
Pat and I are big-city escapees. We moved from Denver to rural Custer County in search of what we hoped would be a higher quality of life. But we also brought a big chunk of our urban mentality with us. Dry wells, water witching, and country humor didn’t fit into our frames of reference.
In Denver, if there was no water coming out of the faucet we plugged in a blow dryer and used it to thaw whichever frozen pipe was the culprit. Or, if it was summer and frozen pipes weren’t the problem, one of us got on the phone and screamed at some helpless city employee to “Get our damn water fixed.”
The Sunday morning when no water came out of our faucets we quickly discovered the pipes weren’t frozen, and there was no city employee to call and scream at. We also learned the axiom rural residents live by: “Your well. Your problem.”
As I melted ice cubes in a pan on the stove to get water for a pot of coffee, Pat — still unwashed but now dressed in jeans and a sweat shirt — discussed solutions to our problem with Knight. The options were limited to: Plan A, drill deeper, and Plan B, haul water from town.
Because Knight said it would be at least a month before he could get his drill rig back out to our property and put Plan A into action, we switched to Plan B.
Each day Pat hauled water from nearby Westcliffe in a 50-gallon plastic drum he had propped in the back seat of our Blazer. What water didn’t slop all over the car, he dumped into our well casing, which we used as a cistern. I gratefully pumped it back out almost as fast as he poured it in. I also went in search of answers.
My search revealed that well problems are more wide spread than we realized. Kirby Perschbacher of Cut No Slak Construction in Salida has coordinated wells as part of his construction projects throughout this area, and recalls problems clients have had with wells.
“We built a house last summer with a well that produced seven to ten gallons of water a minute,” he said. “By the time the house was finished, it [the well] was only producing two gallons a minute.”
Ours, too, had been a high-producing well, about 200 gallons of water an hour. Armed with that knowledge, we had shrugged off Knight’s warning that “Quantity and quality are not guaranteed” as nothing more than the words-in-fine-print that appear on all legal contracts. Now those words had come back to haunt us.
Because drilling a private well is an expensive undertaking — from $15 to $30 a foot, depending on the terrain — I wondered why, as our contract stated, there are no guarantees. I also wondered what happened to the water. Where did it go?
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Perschbacher had one idea. “People are building in worse locations,” he said. “So, the potential is greater for [water] problems.”
That may be true for some homeowners, but I wasn’t certain the location of our well was the problem. All our neighbors have reliable wells. Although well depths range from 125 feet to about 600 feet, none has gone dry.
A call to Don Spano, a geology professor at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo brought the response, “I can tell you what happened. You didn’t go deep enough.”
Pat and I had already discovered that “go deep” is more than a football expression, and that at 100 feet, our well wasn’t deep enough. That’s why we were hauling water and waiting for Knight to bring his rig back so we could “drill deeper.” But I wanted to know how deep is deep enough.
“There’s no way of knowing,” Spano said. “The water table will fluctuate, depending on how much water recharges the region. In periods of heavy rain the water table is going to be high. In periods of low precipitation it’s going to come down.”
Spano continued, “People who do drilling use subsurface geology maps. They look at the rock type of the subsurface. From that they can make reasonable assumptions that because there is this type of layering and subsurface rock structure, it’s reasonable that they should get water.”
The information on the maps also determines how deep the well should be. “You might be at the beginning of a layer of granite that you have to go down 300 feet to get through [to reach water],” Spano said.
He also explained why there is such a variance in the well depths in our area. “Your neighbors may only have to go through 50 feet, because the granite may not extend as far on their property.”
Spano’s comment that the geology maps only provide a “reasonable assumption” that there will be water in any given area, along with Knight’s recent pacing in the dirt by our wellhead with a copper rod in his hand, inspired me to take a closer look at the practice of dowsing or witching. After all, if modern technology and science can’t guarantee water, why rule out a method that is older than science and been in use longer?
However, Susan Vanderpool, a representative of the American Society of Dowsers, did little to reassure me when she said, “I have a 50-50 accuracy rate when I dowse a well.” When she added, “But some dowsers are 90 percent accurate,” I remained unconvinced.
According to literature from the Society, dowsing is an ancient method for finding water that was widely accepted in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Dowsing, or water-witching, may have been introduced in America by the first colonists. Today, the American Society of Dowsers, founded in 1961 in Danville, Vt., has 5,000 members worldwide.
The Society literature also notes that in colonial America, anyone who “dug a well without first having it witched was considered a fool.” That belief still thrives in rural America today.
When word got out that Pat and I planned to start construction on our new home, with a well being the first stage, several concerned neighbors offered to witch our land. Knight also witched our property before bringing in his drill rig.
Pat even succumbed to the legend and bought a couple of copper rods, which he bent into the accepted L shape before traipsing around our property, a rod in each hand, in search of water.
Besides the dowsing method used by Knight and attempted by my husband — walking the land with some type of divining rod — Vanderpool also mentioned map dowsing.
“You send a topographic map of your property to the dowser,” Vanderpool said. “The dowser then breaks the map into quadrants and uses a pencil or pen on a string as a pendulum to locate water.”
I didn’t see much difference between map dowsing as explained by Vanderpool and Spano’s description of how well drillers study subsurface geology maps to find water. I believed there had to be a better way.
Ken Watts, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Water Resource Division in Pueblo, assured me that there are more reliable geophysical methods for locating water. It is possible to determine water quality and quantity using low frequency radio waves or seismic waves, although both methods may be too expensive for the average homeowner.
“A study can cost thousands of dollars,” Watts said. “It depends on the level of complexity and level of competence of the person performing the tests. It may run as much as $1,500 to $2,000 a day.”
More importantly, Watts said there are a lot of people willing to take a homeowner’s money with the promise that they will tell them where to drill and be certain to hit water.
“But as a trained geologist, even I can’t guarantee water quantity or quality,” Watts said. “Instead, offer to pay double their fee if you get a good well, or pay nothing if you don’t get a good quantity of quality water. I bet you won’t get any takers.”
Even though the technology is there for those who can afford it, most well drillers rely on traditional methods-map reading and dowsing-to determine where to drill a well.
Knight said he has thousands of dollars worth of maps in his office, encompassing all of the subdivisions where his company works. He also combines dowsing with his 21 years of experience to determine where and how deep to drill for water. But, he still occasionally misses his mark.
“I probably hit about one dry well a year,” he said. “Two years ago a family from Texas wanted a well on their property. I drilled 800 feet without getting water. They gave up, sold the land and moved back to Texas.”
Perschbacher has had similar experiences. “I had customers who went 500 feet without hitting water, and they walked away from it. At $20 a foot, that’s a lot of money to walk away from,” he said.
Pat and I aren’t ready to give up, sell our land or walk away, yet. We like it in the country, and are learning to take the problems along with the peace and quiet.
As for our well, Knight believes we hit a large, underground pool of water which was full of rain and snow run-off during the spring. The drought conditions of summer caused the water table to drop, as Spano said it would, and the well wasn’t being recharged as fast as we were draining it. Because the well wasn’t deep enough to store excess water, eventually we ran it dry.
Our new well is 250 feet deep and produces about 150 gallons of water an hour. It appears to be a good well, but each time I turn on the faucet the thought crosses my mind that those crystal clear, sparkling drops washing down the drain may be the last.
When I lived in Denver, I took it for granted that water would always be there when I wanted it. I let the faucet run while I brushed my teeth, took leisurely 30-minute showers and pre-washed the dishes before stacking them in the dishwasher.
I skipped over articles in the local paper that discussed such boring topics as revisions to the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, or water project proposals and treaties. What did it matter to me if Kansas sued Colorado for depriving it of large amounts of water?
I learned the hard way that it does matter. Whether living in a metropolitan area with city water or in a rural community with a private well, when it comes to water, waste is an ugly word.
I also learned that although the odds of hitting water when drilling a well are better than the odds of winning the lottery, it’s still important to remember that old adage “you pay your money, and you take your chances.”
Rayna Bailey and her husband and nine goats live next to an expensive well in rural Westcliffe, and she’s working on her bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo.
