The Well

We asked Bruce Gunderson from Karlstad to drill a well for us. Bruce has been drilling wells in the area for a long time; he drilled Israelson's well years ago (hit water at 33 feet). The first well by the cabin was drilled to about 250' with no water. The noticeable event from the first well was drilling up some wood from about 100'. We wondered how old that wood is. I'm not sure how expensive carbon dating is but it would be nice to know the age of the wood.

The second location you can see from the pictures. It's near the disk and the fence along the north side of the 80. Again, no luck. I think Bruce was as disappointed as we were. When I asked him what he thought we should do next he said, "Go home". That was because he has three or four more wells to drill before winter sets in and since we didn't have that urgency, he moved his stuff. This gives us some time to plan what we do next.

One of the pictures shows Floyd trying his "hands" at witching for water. Actually we both tried it with no response from the coat hangers other that our hands got really cold.

I'm not sure what Bruce's bill will be for these two dry holes. He's going to talk to Floyd and send the bill to him. I think the cost for a dry hole is about $5/foot which for us would be about $2500 for the two dry holes.

Hard to build a cabin with no water so this seems to be our highest priority.



This is the second location for a well. At this point the rig is down about 170 feet. The tub you see in the foreground is used to hold water that is used as a lubricant for the drill. Since it is also pulling up clay and ground up pieces of rock, it needs needs to be shoveled out.


This rig can drill to about 300'. If you need to drill deeper, there are other folks around that can do this. Many times when you do drill deeper in this country, you find brackish (salt) water.
On November 12th, Floyd and I spend most of the day helping Bruce finish drilling to 253 feet. You can tell the hardness of the soil by how fast the drill goes down. At one time we did hit something softer but it didn't last long.

For both dry holes, Bruce is required by the state to "grout" the holes closed.



The tank of water is required to lubricate the drilling system and to pull debris up from the bottom of the hole. When we started drilling this past Wednesday, it tookus about 2 hoursto deal with ice and frozen pipes before we could start.



Yep, this is water witching. We cut a coat hanger and created two "L" shaped pieces and held one in each hand. You can see Floyd holding the one in his left hand below the elbow of the hanger. There are folks in this country that swear by this process. We left a message with Glenn Anderson to try witching for us but didn't hear back from him.